


If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you

by Scappodaqui



Series: If [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Also AoU!Steve would not approve of the language in this fic, Angst, BDSM if you squint, Body Horror, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Bucky Barnes has a dirty mouth, Bucky Barnes-centric, But really it's pretty minor, Character Study, D-Day, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Foreshadowing, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, I'm warning for everything, Inarticulate Yearning, Internalized Homophobia, Jealous Bucky Barnes, M/M, Mercy Killing, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Sexism, Post-Serum, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Bucky Barnes, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Resolved Sexual Tension, Sexual Content, Symbolism, There will be comfort, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-08-12
Packaged: 2018-03-31 19:09:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 40,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3989410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scappodaqui/pseuds/Scappodaqui
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky sometimes caught himself thinking, about the war: <i>is all of this happening because old men saw the raw life in young men and wanted to squelch it?</i> It was the same thing he had thought in school. Running track. When he had worked in the crew building the World’s Fair Railroad. And especially when he got his draft letter: <i>they want to crush us like a piece of tin on train tracks.</i></p><p>Begins at Kreischberg prison camp, continues after the rescue.</p><p>Lots of angst.  Lots of literary references, foreshadowing, and symbolism porn. A little bit of actual porn.</p><p>Oh, and also there’s a bit where we learn seven-year-old Bucky tried to play pirates by naming Steve “Jolly Rogers.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

There was one kid, in both his work crew and his holding cell, who couldn’t stop counting to himself. Almost all the time. His name was Cullum and he counted: “One Mississippi two Mississippi,” under his breath, pausing to cough. Sometimes, he Mississippi’d himself into the thousands, so quietly you’d only notice if you got real close.

Lying in the straw against the wall and trying to sleep one night… it smelled like shit and sickness, so deep in his nose Bucky didn’t know where the stink started and he ended. His body ached so bad it twitched. The breathless counting and coughing wouldn’t stop.

Bucky sighed and sat up, leaning over Cullum, whose glassy stare went right through him. So he grabbed the kid by the wrist and said, “Private. Enough with the fucking Mississippi or, I swear to God. I’ll escape and hijack an aircraft, fly you to America, and throw you in it.”

Cullum stared at him, eyes wide, snot running slowly down his lip. He stopped. His hand spasmed, then relaxed. Bucky held on tight. He made tiny shushing sounds the way he’d used to do with Becca when she was scared of the dark.

It transpired that Cullum liked Mark Twain and that was why he counted that way. That and the mindlessness of it. But some nights he’d talk instead. Bucky gave him part of his water ration. It seemed like a great idea until he started coughing too.

* * *

 Why the little doctor with a face like a pug picked him: probably because he moved to stand in front of Cullum and also, yeah, probably because he spit at the little man’s feet.

* * *

 Bucky sometimes caught himself thinking, about the war: _is all of this happening because old men saw the raw life in young men and wanted to squelch it?_ It was the same thing he had thought in school. Running track. When he had worked in the crew building the World’s Fair Railroad. And especially when he got his draft letter: _they want to crush us like a piece of tin on train tracks._

You couldn’t just fight back, though, not head-on. No; what you could do was play like it was all a game. Lightly, with a jaunty tilt to your hat. You had to follow the rules--what they asked of you--follow them askew.

Had to make the rules your own, make it your will. _Bone and blood and sinew_. Had to keep your eye fixed through the scope, feel the clockwork tick of lungs and heart. Understand that it was all clockwork, all the same moving pieces. It all followed the same rules.

Bucky realized that the thing about the world was, its rules followed him everywhere, even into Hell. _This is how you’re supposed to be. This is how it’s supposed to be. This is how you should act._ They had a protocol for capture: you were supposed to recite your name, rank, and serial number. You don’t give them anything else. That was the way it was supposed to be.

The rules knocked him down to a number. A tin soldier on a tin table. They stopped him feeling fear. Rules kept the screaming frantic _thing_ of him tucked down deep in the base of his brain.

Hell, baseball without rules was madness too, just a flat bleak open blue and green and a tiny white ball, and he hadda remember why the tiny white ball was so goddamn _important_ , he hadda remember why he wanted to grab the thing right out of the air. With the smell of leather and dirt and blood on his tongue, stitching against his fingers, no, his arms, and he knew exactly how to get it to go where he wanted and _explode into red--_

He felt hot, then cold. He saw he had lasted longer than they thought he would. He was good at that, he guessed: at the selfish business of staying alive. Sometimes he felt. Especially compared to Steve (but once he got to the front, even compared to the men he saw around him, who looked somehow faded and threadbare in their own skins, ready to give up the ghost of whatever was inside)... sometimes he felt like he had a motor in him that wouldn’t quit, that ran under the hood without his even thinking about it.

He didn’t know how long it had been.

Pain and unconsciousness stretched out time, or compressed it. He remembered when the two excruciating minutes of a track race felt like the whole of his life, like the neat set of laps around the track perfectly prefigured his life and death. And he’d always fucked it up and wanted another go at it and and and by God he still did. Wanted to do it again. Do it better. Do it right.

He could never do it right. Something always went crinkly ‘round the edges. He gave “Tom _fuckin’_ Sawyer” instead of his name just once. Same serial number, though. The serial number reminded him that this was not his choice. He played by the rules, mostly, but they weren’t his choice.

When they asked him for the name of his CO, he said, “Rosebud.”

At one point the little pug of a man, whom they called Dr. Zola, came and hummed, clucking his tongue. _“Das hatte ich nicht erwartet. Beginnen wir mit der Zufuhr des Serums.”_

They slid something over him something like an iron lung, something metal and dark that shook, something over his face too. He bit through his tongue. For a second the texture reminded him of chewing gum. It swelled and got clumsy and muffled him when he screamed. He blacked out.

They stabbed at his left side with something, a spike or a needle, so deep that parts inside felt the air, so deep that he imagined gaping rips and viscera. The strange thing was he must have hallucinated that because when they came back to prod him there was no pain there. He must have been asleep or confusing himself with someone else, one of the men who had screamed on another table and then stopped screaming.

Dr. Zola leaned over him, expression distant and almost genial, and Bucky wanted to spit at him again but didn’t. “ _Sehr gut_ ,” Zola said, not to him. _“Er ist sehr stark._ ”

That meant good, strong. Whatever _that_ meant. Bucky said, with his breath coming in shallow gasps: “I always look well when I am near death.” It just slipped out, a stupid quote from a stupid movie. (He had seen it with Steve on a double date. Greta Garbo’s sickly, languishing lady on screen and Steve’s poor date leaning just a little away from him ‘cause he looked just as gray--but the next day when Bucky said ‘hey bud you’re lookin’ better’ Steve had quoted that line himself, with only slight bitterness--)

He decided that while he was gabbling he might as well tell the Nazis that the Allies had flying cars. But he couldn’t get it out, the joke. What came out was name, rank, serial number (the rules). When the guards came and roughly tipped water in his mouth he swallowed and gasped and swallowed and grasped. Fingers reaching haplessly for something, like the cold sting of water reminded him that there was a reason to want to get free. A little white imaginary ball in the air. He laughed hysterically and couldn’t stop until they pressed a hood over his face and he ran out of air. He woke up and realized that now he was the one counting Mississippis. He forced himself back to name. Rank. Serial.

He didn’t remember everything he said.

There were times when he didn’t care, anymore. Because inside the gaping black core of him, it turned out, was a powerful, powerful buzz that didn’t care about the rules at all. That part of him was roiling life and wanted nothing but more life, wanted, that just wanted. That storm inside was so strong that sometimes, right after Bucky blacked out and came back, he heard himself already saying something--a couple words--and they came out choking and incoherent and singing and from far, far, away, and it wasn’t him who was talking, it was those singing words coming out of the darkness even before he did. As if the things he wanted had to crawl blackly out of him, rats from a sinking ship: the things he wanted and might not ever have.

He always went back to his name, rank, and serial number, though. He knew he’d lost it when he saw Steve and couldn’t figure if he was waking up or if he’d gone to sleep, or if this was what death was like. He was awfully glad he’d emptied out all the blackness inside, by now, because there was really nothing left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Chapter and series title, and one of the lines in the fic, come from [Rudyard Kipling's 'If'](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/46473). It's kind of an iconic ode to machismo. I think it completely fits the whole situation here. Please read it. It is quite stirring.  
> -Counting Mississippis was actually first documented in 1950, so I'm taking a minor liberty there.  
> -Bucky worked on the [World's Fair Railroad](http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/IND_1939_Worlds_Fair_Line) in '38-'39.  
> -The Greta Garbo movie he mentions is _Camille_ , from 1936.  
> -Rosebud, obviously, is from _Citizen Kane_.  
>   
> 
> You can find me on tumblr as [samtalksfunny](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/samtalksfunny/). I discuss a lot of Captain-America-verse meta and crack theories. Please join me.
> 
> Deep thanks to my two excellent betas: [MostFacinorous](http://archiveofourown.org/users/MostFacinorous/pseuds/MostFacinorous) for help with plot and character motivation, and [just-tea-thanks](http://just-tea-thanks.tumblr.com/) for coherence, flow, and military realism. You guys are the best.


	2. Chapter 2

They had made Steve into the shiniest toy soldier of all. Looking at him was spooky, unreal: like Bucky had gone to sleep on the table and never woken up right. He still felt far away. Even days after the rescue, when he had been pronounced in tip-top shape barring some feeding up, he felt it: itchy in his skin. Hot and then cold. Sometimes very hot, bursting, like overripe fruit. Sounds too loud, smells too strong. The sizes of everything--not just his best friend--felt wrong.

“Musta been like waking up in the goddamn land of Oz,” he said to Steve one night at dinner, looking up at him ( _up_ at him, Jesus, it was disorienting).

“I guess… yeah,” Steve said. “Got out of the machine and there I was, in Munchkinland.” He elbowed Bucky.

“And all colored in,” Bucky said, pushing back against his arm without much hope of winning, “Without needing me to tell you what the colors are.”

“Yeah, it’s _technicolor_ now.” Steve shook his head, eyes wide in honest wonder.

“Click your heels together three times,” Bucky said drily. “Maybe we’ll wake up.”

Steve gave him one of his sideway glances, his attempt at being serious. Bucky just smiled, guileless and blank. The same look he had always given Steve after he caught him staring at him a beat too long over his sketchbook back home. A look that never failed to shut him up. Sure enough: after a second Steve ducked his head and went back to poking at his food.

Monty came over to ask a question and Bucky stood up and said something friendly and meaningless to him. Turned in his plate, and went to have a smoke.

* * *

 He had found out on the march back that Private Cullum never made it out of the facility at Kreischberg. Bucky tried to forget. He wasn’t entirely sure he had made it out himself.

In his debriefing he quoted back everything he remembered the Germans saying and doing, though it wasn’t much. He didn’t mention anything else. They thanked him for his bravery. He thought: _no_.

Steve was an idiot, but he wasn’t a bad Captain America. He galvanized people. Grudgingly, aware of something like jealousy, Bucky had to give him that. The men loved him already. He had saved them and he listened to them. He fought to put together the unit even though Colonel Phillips threw up his hands at the trouble of clearing Morita, Jones, Dernier, and Falsworth to serve with him.

“Ain’t like any of this is regular anyhow,” Bucky pointed out to Phillips, who looked at him as if he were a bug on his shoe. Bucky had honestly been pretty well-behaved in front of superiors before. He just couldn’t bring himself to care as much anymore. Maybe Steve being here was to blame. “You realize,” flicking his eyebrows up for a beat, “Captain America’s not actually a Captain?”

Phillips made the title official the next day, probably out of spite, and gave him a week of staff duty.

Captain America. Of the two of them Bucky had always been better at play-acting, he figured. Largely because six-year-old Steve had always been real literal and come out with shit like, ‘but I’m _not really_ a pirate’ when Bucky tried to name him the Great Jolly Rogers, and Bucky had sighed and said,‘Yeah, that’s the point,’ and been a pirate for both of them. Eventually, Steve figured out how to draw himself as a the parts Bucky wanted him to play, the art a bolster for his imagination. That had worked, but it had taken a solid year of games like: _Steve Rogers and the pirate. Steve Rogers and Hercules. Steve Rogers and the amazing Houdini_. And later, of course: _Steve Rogers and Buck Rogers_. Bucky made himself into anyone he wanted. Steve pretty much didn’t know how to be anyone but himself. (He also hadn’t had the energy, Bucky realized in retrospect, to do much more than draw).

Now he shook his head at stories of Steve on the USO tour. He could just imagine.

Maybe that was it: Steve wasn’t play-acting. Bucky wasn’t sure which idea scared him more. That Steve _wasn’t really_ Captain America, or that he was.

Steve was _such_ an idiot. He didn’t know what he was getting himself into. Jesus Christ, did no one else see he was making it up as he went along, the wire-frame of his stubbornness now bulked out into three vivid dimensions? Or were they all too dazzled by the… the technicolor? Colonel Phillips must have realized it, because he ordered Captain Rogers and his freshly minted elite squad to go through eight weeks of training at base before they shipped out. Bucky didn’t think much of Colonel Phillips, who played his role a little too avidly for his taste, but he wasn’t all bombast. And, too, thank God: someone else willing to yell at this shiny new Steve.

Steve might run rings around them all now, but he wasn’t doing it _right_. They all did ten laps around the quarter-mile oval every morning, apart from Captain America, who just kept going.

By the third day Bucky felt as fit as he ever had, surprised not to be more out of condition. It felt good, running. It felt natural, it felt thoughtless and pure. It jarred him back into his body and into the moment, though surreality remained when he couldn’t dig deep enough--despite turning a 64-second final quarter--to feel the pull of true exertion in the muscles of his stomach. He finished a full two hundred yards ahead of Monty, his closest competition. Dernier and Jones would be next, possibly because Dernier refused to live up to his name.

After he’d finished his laps Bucky planted himself next to the track, at ease, to offer useful critique.

Steve ran with his jaw jutting out, like he had to concentrate hard. Fists clenched like he was about to take a swing at someone, and his arms, Lord, Bucky’s old coach would tape ‘em together at the elbows behind his back. Someday Bucky would teach him to stop tensing up like that, keeping his chest tight against the attack of wheezing that wasn’t going to come. He couldn’t even _run_ right, even after all those months he’d spent sketching Bucky at his track meets. He was just intent on his own way of throwing himself headlong. Almost more graceful for all his leftover self-conscious klutziness. Bucky wished Steve could take down a drawing of it. Though of course he couldn’t, because he was doing it.

But he was doing it all wrong, anyhow. Definitely all wrong.

“Less arms, ya goof,” he yelled, as Steve came hurtling by. “Shoulders down! You keep flapping your wings like that and you might take off.”

After a full quarter mile lap--which took no more than forty-five seconds, and during which his gait did smooth out some--Steve crunched to a halt next to him. He wasn’t even out of breath. Bucky could see the awe in his face at that, the delight. “Funny, I was gonna say the same thing about your mouth.” His big chest moved up and down in slow, steady rhythm, powerful as a horse’s.

“You got that line from Dugan,” Bucky said.

“True, though.” Steve beamed at Bucky so hard he wanted to grab him around the neck and shake him, realized he couldn’t reach, and rocked back on his heels, off balance.

“Come on, Cap.” Ironical emphasis. “Penalty lap. For cribbing.”

“Maybe I should go practice my long jump while we’re at it.”

“ _Never fucking do that again._ ”

* * *

 He wasn’t much good on the rifle range, either.

“Who taught you to shoot?”

“We learned in basic… and Peg--I mean,” looking around, dropping his voice and his shoulders… not that it stopped anyone noticing. Steve had never been good at playing things close to the vest. His tells came out amplified in this new, broad frame. Morita, who had been sighting at the target to their right, lowered his rifle and turned to look at them, amused at the byplay. “Agent Carter gave me a tip or two.”

“Carter? I hear she uses a goddamn _machine_ gun.”

Steve made a face of discomfort, forehead wrinkling. “Not bad with a pistol either.”

“Jesus, Rogers.”

Morita was mouthing words that were likely obscene over Steve’s shoulder. Bucky grinned in return, pretending innocence.

“Hey, no, Buck, it wasn’t like that.”

“Sure it wasn’t. When’d you get so good at smooth-talking the ladies anyhow?”

“Learned from the best, I guess.”

“Yeah, try telling _her_ that.”

In a moment, after he had taken a clean shot between long, steady breaths, he turned back to Steve.

“Rogers, come on, that kind of twitchy trigger finger and you’ll never get anywhere with the dames.”

Steve made a strangled sound.

Bucky was pleased to notice that his blush still started at the tips of his ears.

Thusly buoyed, he beat his old record and shot out a target at one thousand yards. Dum Dum threw his hat in the air. That was all right. He liked the attention. He didn’t know how he’d made the shot, though.

* * *

 “Carter teach you to throw a punch, too? You’re hitting like a girl.” By now, he knew he was just shooting off his mouth, acting like an idiot himself, but he couldn’t stop.

“She doesn’t hit like a girl at all.” Steve stepped back and shrugged, rolling his shoulders, cricking his neck to either side. Usually Bucky would have been amused at the posturing (Steve was copying him--and Bucky had been copying the fighters they’d seen at Gold’s). Killing time because it was always a little harder for him to stand up to Bucky than it was for him to stand up to, well, just about everyone else. “You should… you gotta stop talking shit about her.”

“Well, you gotta stop pulling your punches.” That was an accusation _Steve_ had made all the damn time before. Of course Bucky had been, he didn’t want to hurt the dumb little punk, but he had known how to do it with enough subtlety that, if Steve allowed himself some willful blindness, they could both pretend he wasn’t.

Steve looked unhappy, now, tight and drawn up, like he was trying to shrink back into his old skinny body. “Don’t know my own strength, Buck, you know that. I don’t wanna hurt you.”

“Doesn’t hurt.” It was scary how much nothing hurt anymore. What had they taken out of him? What had they put in? He had agreed with himself _not to think of that_. “Okay? Nothing hurts. At _all_.” He took a swing at Steve, who stepped sideways out of the way. Another. The funny part was that he still instinctively held back, too. _Fuck._

Steve brought up his arm to block, still moving backwards. Bucky couldn’t see straight at all, wanted to tear down this stupid wall of muscle that had grown around his friend, wanted to break him back down.

“Bucky, _stop_ it.”

“ _You_ stop. You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing.” Steve caught his fist this time and squeezed. It did hurt. It surprised him. “You gonna pull your punches when it’s just some German kid who don’t know any better, Cap, or you gonna bust his skull in, and maybe like it--”

“Stop it!” Steve grabbed his other hand, tight, and shoved him back so hard he sprawled in the grass. His head hit the ground with force enough to bounce.

“Oh shit. Bucky.” Steve was on his knees next to him, all folded up, forehead wrinkled, blinking fast down at him.

“‘M fine.” He struggled up onto his elbows, slowly rolled over onto one side, and came up to his knees, facing Steve.

“Shit.”

They sat there for a long time.

“I know you wouldn’t like it,” Bucky said finally. “I never did. Do.” He stopped. Started again. “You know I lied.”

“What?” Steve startled. Bucky could see the little gears in his mind turning, readying excuses for how whatever Bucky was about to admit wasn’t really so bad. Maybe it wasn’t.

“About joining up. I got the draft. Wouldn’t’a left. Otherwise.” Four days had passed between getting his draft letter and getting up the courage to come home, smile on his face and a beer already in hand, to tell Steve he’d decided to enlist. So he wouldn’t worry; because frankly, it was what Steve would have done. Bucky had been used to doing for him what he couldn’t, so it just made sense.

“Bucky… are you saying you wanna go home?” Steve swallowed. ”’Cause after what you went through I think anyone--”

“No. No. Wasn’t any more than the rest of ‘em.”

“When I found you on the table, though. They said no one else had lasted…”

“Guess I’m lucky like that.” _They took something out and put it back in wrong._ “I don’t wanna leave. Would you? You wouldn’t. Maybe I’ve been acting like a shit, Steve, but you gotta know that you don’t know what it’s like and maybe you think you don’t need me anymore but--” _the hell was he saying_ , musta hit his head harder than he thought.

“What?”

“Never mind. I’m rambling.” Bucky caught his breath. “You really clocked me one, I guess that Agent Carter does know her stuff.” There. That’d fix things. “But when it comes to thousand-yard shots and running form, you need some work. Luckily I know a guy. Real good at both. Real modest too. Kind of a jerk sometimes. You gotta let it go.”

Steve was going with it, his expression smoothing out-- _good_. “You sure everything’s…”

“ _Forget_ about it,” Bucky said, putting on a hard, bright smile. “Let it go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -[just-tea-thanks](http://just-tea-thanks.tumblr.com/) informs me that the proper punishment for Bucky's improper conduct would be staff duty, which she describes as "Staying up all night fetching things, running errands and doing paperwork under some boot brand new lieutenant. it's annoying, NCOs hate it."


	3. Chapter 3

Bucky’s heart beat thirty-four times a minute at rest: slow, but relentless.

He thought that was why he made such a good sniper. He had almost a full second of stillness in which to squeeze the trigger. A long pause between the stroke of his heart and the rush of his blood.

He was able, nowadays, to retreat back inside his body. Getting ready to get back to the business of the war. He considered their target, Hydra, the guy he’d seen rip away his own face; he considered not knowing what was underneath. He thought how he had seen dead men’s skulls before, but seeing a living one was worse, because it… why? because it meant they could change you that deep down, maybe--take you somewhere that wasn’t even death, that was--

He considered what they might find in the bases they planned to target and what might find them. He should be out for blood, shouldn’t he? Out for vengeance, filled with righteous anger. But he wasn’t, because he didn’t feel anger. He wanted to. He tried to. But what he felt was fear.

Still, he stayed inside himself a little better and a little longer every day, at least as long he was at the shooting range or moving or following orders. He no longer wanted time alone to think.

His shots improved, his focus sharpened. Everything but his heartbeat felt muffled, and dropped away. Emptied out; all the machinery clean.

He got very good very quickly, heard things like ‘best shot I’ve seen.’ He ventured to Steve that he had some suggestions for improving his rifle, things he’d seen the Germans doing that he hadn’t been able to in the field. Steve said he’d ask Howard Stark to modify the M1941, his favorite weapon for long-range shots. Bucky made a careful list of specifics he wanted to request.

Steve seemed glad that he was going to meet Howard, maybe because it showed Bucky had an interest in something he’d used to.

And, well, sure: Bucky was a _fan_. He still felt awed by Howard Stark, even knowing Steve talked to him up close all the time. Oh, and even knowing, after the flying-car debacle at the Expo, that he was a bit of a bullshitter. But Bucky supposed he was a bit of a bullshitter himself, so. He could appreciate a guy who carried it off with style. He’d once read that Stark had had a fling with _Lana Turner_. That had impressed him at one point.

Steve came along, both to introduce them and to get work done on the shield. (Bucky had about hit the ceiling when Steve told him the shield he was so attached to was _a prototype_ , not intended for field use. Then again: you could say the same about Steve.)

Steve was so pleased with himself for making the introduction that Bucky let himself play up his giddiness, mostly because he figured, the kind of guy Stark was, he’d appreciate it. Not that there wasn’t a grain of truth to it too; he really did have that collection of newspaper clippings at home about the Stark Expo and the Stark Particle and Lana Turner and all that.

“It’s an honor to meet you, sir,” Bucky said when they came face to face, without a trace of sarcasm.

Mr. Stark waved off the ceremony, moving briskly around the table that held the disassembled weapon. He looked smaller up close and very debonair. “Call me Howard.” He nodded, touched Steve on the arm all familiar-like, then held out his hand to Bucky. “Sergeant Barnes.”

“Bucky’s fine.” He shook hands with Mr. Stark. “We have three Jameses in our unit now,” he explained, “so it’s really hopeless to...”

“Don’t listen to him, he’s been Bucky forever and never complained about it ‘til now.”

 _Steve, shut up_. “Right, well, Mr. Stark--”

“Howard.”

“Mind if I take a look?”

“Be my guest.”

He had added everything Bucky had thought of and some things he hadn’t known were possible. He’d fixed the recoil problem. Had added adjustable telescopic and iron sights, since Bucky had better than perfect vision and if he needed to stay under cover, would want to be able to switch. He had even made an infrared light, with a lens like the reflective part of a cat’s eye, so he could shoot better at night. He explained to Bucky that he’d have to carry a power source, but Stark had worked on that, too, based on the the weird Nazi gear they’d dragged out of Kreischberg. He’d provided special rounds, more aerodynamic; he’d created a specific synthetic propellant.

Bucky was impressed and had to stop himself from saying so too often, like some dumb _Gee Whiz!_ kid in a comic. Steve likely had no idea what they were talking about, with some of the technical stuff. But he followed along with that intent look on his face, like now he’d remember all of this. Actually, Bucky realized: he would. He said he remembered everything these days. (How much had they changed in there, anyway?).

Howard had Bucky put the rifle together and hold it, so they could get the cheek guard to sit right. It wasn’t quite like he’d want it yet, not like he’d hold it in the field. He would have to take it onto the range tomorrow, after Howard had finished making adjustments.

When they had finished, he disassembled the weapon quickly and mindlessly, watching Howard and Steve talk about field tests they wanted to do on the uniform. Bucky arranged the pieces of his M1941 so they lay flat and neat on the table. _Lock, stock, and barrel,_ he thought, _means_ everything there is _. Well, everything important._

Howard Stark ambled back over to him, holding out a hand. Steve was still on the far side of the tent, fiddling with something new Howard had given him. It was some sort of grip or handle, looked like. He was trying to twist the shield on his arm as if he were about to throw it, but not let it go. He looked like a kid with a toy. He looked like one of those discus-throwers, the museum statues.

Stark was beckoning. Why--

“Oh--” Bucky handed back the rifle barrel he hadn’t realized he still held. “You made it lighter, too.”

“It’s an alloy,” Howard said, nodding, setting it back on the table; he came to stand next to Bucky with his hands in his pockets. They stood there together watching Steve, Steve and his shield. “A minor adjustment, just a little something I cooked up.” Bucky recognized, with amusement, the false modesty of a fundamentally immodest man.

“It’s amazing,” Bucky said honestly. “Really. This’ll be great. I wanted to say, Mr. Stark, I’m a big admirer of your work.”

“Yes,” Howard drawled, following Bucky’s line of sight deliberately to Steve. “I can see that.”

Bucky didn’t think he liked Howard Stark after all.

* * *

 Here was the thing: Howard was dead wrong and it was all backwards and upside down. _He_ wasn’t the one who was like that.

 _Steve_ was the one who was like that. Bucky had all but known that; known from how he always talked about not being the kind to marry, not just because of money, or his health, but just because. The way he just didn’t talk about women that way. And oh right, all those times he went out walking with Charlie Thompson. They didn’t talk about it, but Bucky _knew_.

Thought he’d known.

Maybe he was wrong about everything, because Steve definitely looked at Carter like she meant something. (Though he still couldn’t talk dirty about her, which made Bucky wonder). But maybe he was different now, which was great, good. He was glad. He just wanted things to make sense was all.

It was all getting tangled up.

Steve had been the one always mooning after him, wasn’t he? He’d known that and maybe he had gotten so he took it for granted. That he had this sort of kid brother whose eyes got full of stars around him. And maybe. Maybe he’d liked that. Not the thought that Steve wanted to…

No…

Bucky had just liked being wanted, was all. He liked being admired.

He’d never needed much more than that. Just figured, like Mark Twain said, a man could live a month off a compliment. He figured he could make do with even less.

* * *

 Bucky’s heart beat thirty-four times a minute at rest. Slow but merciless in his chest no matter how deeply he breathed. Nowadays it kept him up at night almost all the time. Sometimes the more he tried to breathe the more it sped up, until it was all he could hear. And Steve knew, because Steve could didn’t just remember everything, these days; he could _hear_ everything, too.

Sometimes he caught himself counting, real quiet, between the beats: _one Mississippi, two Mississippi._

Steve could hear. Bucky knew he woke him up from the way his breathing changed in the next bunk. But he didn’t say anything. It pissed him off that Steve knew he hadn’t got his head right yet. Anyway, he wasn’t talking to him much, these days. So usually, if he couldn’t get back to sleep, he went outside to have a smoke or eat his hoarded M&Ms. It was stupid, but he still had a habit of saving some for Steve in case his sugar dropped. Of course he didn’t need to anymore.

It wasn’t like he was the only one, he told himself, especially as the weeks until they shipped out slipped away. They were a unit now. He saw they all had things they didn’t talk about head-on. He had heard the poetry Monty liked to quote. Even though he didn’t understand half of it, he knew the half he did understand had something dark in it, something fatalistic. Also, a strong streak of socialism.

He’d picked up the more colorful of Gabe and Dernier’s French phrases, though his own accent was “Even more Brooklyn than the Captain’s.” Like that was _bad_. More importantly, he’d learned how Jones and Dernier would talk quietly in French when they wanted to say something no one else should hear, like after Jones had to jump to a little more quickly than the rest of them when that snot-nosed Lt. walked by.

He saw how he wasn’t the only one who hoarded food and cigarettes: Morita was always stuffing a roll or an apple in his pocket when he left the mess hall, and they got in the habit of silently trading each other for preferred candy. He also agreed with Bucky about the big red circles on Steve’s shield; they’d both seen medics get picked off by the red cross on their helmets before. But Steve had pointed out that if someone shot the shield, well, that was what it was _for_. Yeah, maybe. (Bucky really didn’t trust Howard Stark’s judgment).

Dum Dum still knew how to get his hands on a good bottle of alcohol. “For a given value of ‘good,’” Jones said.

A given value of ‘good.’

Enough to get by. Enough to get lost in.

Lighter, a new alloy, one that shook less when you fired. Lock, stock, and barrel: all you needed, for a given value of good enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -[Howard Stark...](http://samtalksfunny.tumblr.com/post/119814151893/daughter-of-ophelia-midnighttypewriter)  
> -M&M's [were invented during WW II](http://www.history.com/news/hungry-history/the-wartime-origins-of-the-mm).


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning: some not-so-explicit sexual content toward the end. (Finally, right?)

Out in the field again, Bucky found the bleak Austrian winter almost a relief. It made things simpler, his world narrower and more defined. Most of his thoughts were taken up by wishing for hot food and a real bed and making sure the men got taken care of. There was camaraderie and trust in their shared exhaustion. Communication at the end of the day turned automatic and quiet and sometimes hilariously blunt--like Dugan’s lament that he’d give anything just to be surrounded by “about six dozen warm titties. This big around. Just… ah… to lie on.”

“Six _dozen_?” Steve said, sounding genuinely shocked.

“Dream big.”

“Your mother didn’t love you enough,” Monty said sagely.

“Face like that, how could she?” Bucky asked.

“Dream small,” Morita said, and snorted. “I’d be happy with six dozen eggs. Scrambled. Lotsa butter.”

“ _On ne saurait faire d’omelette sans casser des oeufs_ ,” Dernier said.

They all looked at Jones except Steve, who’d picked up on French quicker than he had any right to.

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” Jones translated.

“That’s the truth,” Bucky agreed.

“Fuck omelets!” Dum Dum said, frustrated. “Why are we talking about omelets?”

“Hungry.”

* * *

 They saw action quickly, and Bucky remembered how yeah, quick was what it was: over before he thought he could blink, six more kills to his name.

He even started to feel proud again: proud of doing his job well, being a good sniper. Filling his role. It never felt like he could get enough to eat and his head ached all the time, but it was true, he could live off a compliment. The rest of them saw how he was efficient and focused, how he often volunteered to take over their watch at night. If they knew why he did that--how he still woke up talking to himself sometimes, his mind a terrifying blank--no one said anything about it.

The only thing was that he and Steve were at loggerheads all the time. Not even arguing, though they did that, but just poking at each other. Little slights that added up because neither of them would back down. It made Bucky think of something Steve’s Ma had said about them one time when they were fighting, which she said she’d got from Father Dawley; “You two are unstoppable force and immovable object.”

They hit a breaking point after one messy skirmish with a convoy they’d run into in the road. Dernier had rigged some explosives to go off when the trucks went by, but something had gone wrong. So of course Bucky had to break cover and run to fire at the mine. And then it had all been chaos and he’d just stayed there, hunkered down behind a blown-out tree stump, and picked off as many as he could.

Steve apparently took exception to this plan. He said he’d yelled at Bucky to get back when he first broke cover, but who the hell heard anything in the middle of a fight like that?

At least Steve had the decency to save it until after dinner, mostly because they didn’t want to rile up the rest of the Commandos. It had been a hard enough day and they were bone-tired, all of them. but Steve got up and motioned for Bucky abruptly after they were done, before he could offer to take first watch.

“Got to talk some things over. Come on, Sergeant.”

“Yessir.” Bucky gave him a salute just this side of sardonic.

They both walked fast these days. Steve didn’t have trouble seeing where he put his feet anymore, or need to take two steps for every one of Bucky’s. And Bucky had abandoned the old habitual hitch in his stride, a swagger meant to give Steve room, without shame, to keep up. Now he was the one who had to hustle. He ground his teeth in frustration, following.

“What is it. What’s the matter,” Bucky said, when they’d made it a safe distance from the camp. Close enough that Steve could still hear any shout of warning, but far enough that they couldn’t be heard. It wasn’t dark. The moon shone almost full through the trees, so bright it made him feel uneasy, like he was being watched. They weren’t, though; they’d scouted the area thoroughly before settling in. It was just, the bright light, from above, was all. He squinted up at Steve, hooking one thumb in his belt, posture determinately relaxed. “If it’s about not jumping at your order, I’m sorry, but we had a fight to win, I was kinda busy.”

“Jesus, Bucky!” Steve looked surprised at his own outburst.

“Taking the Lord’s name in vain?”

“Stop. Please, stop. You can’t think it’s because you didn’t _obey_ my _orders_. What do you think I am?”

“You’re the star-spangled man with the plan.” That came from somewhere sour and mean. He shook his head, looked off to one side. “No. Come on Steve, you know I just couldn’t hear you in time and then I was already behind cover. Honest, I just had to sit there and pick ‘em off.”

Steve opened his mouth and closed it; he was trying, obviously, not to give in to the impulse to just snipe back. He’d thought about something he had to say. Steve with a speech to deliver, Lord was Bucky in for it.

“What I’m trying to say,” he started, determinedly scowling down at Bucky to keep him from talking back. “What I’m saying is, why do you go on and on about me taking stupid risks, and act like I’m some kind of wet-behind-the-ears kid? I like to think I’ve been a good Captain. You’ve even said so.”

“Yeah, because you _are_. Geez, Steve, it’s just teasing. We all do that--”

“Teasing is one thing. This is covering your own ass. You heard me.” He wasn’t quite meeting Bucky’s eyes now. “ _You’re_ taking the stupid risks, not me. Today; the time we thought Monty went down… you’re doing that a lot, Buck.”

Bucky looked heavenward for patience. Nothing doing. “‘Cause you don’t do _anything_ stupid. Like bust in a tank with your shield.”

“I have the serum. It’s different. You saw how it was when I took a hit. It was better in two days.”

“You have the serum. You’re the perfect fuckin’ soldier and you can walk away from a shot in the leg, fine.” Not that he hadn’t had to sit and hold Steve’s spasming muscle open while Morita fished for the bullet, forget that. “You can still _die_.” That was it, wasn’t it, Steve had this great powerful thing inside him now. He could do what Bucky could almost do too, which was this: when your body got so well-conditioned it ran on its own, you could ride it like a thing separate from your will, you could watch it from outside. You wore your own skin weightless, one body out of many bodies, doing your will. And the problem with that was, you made your body separate from your mind--a puppet, a machine. You wound up wearing it lightly. You could let it drop and forget to pick it up at all. And Steve had worn himself lightly even _before_. “Coulda been a shot to the head. You can still fuckin’ die.”

“We all can,” Steve said quietly. Ah right, the justice-and-equality voice, the one where he couldn’t figure out where Steve stopped and Captain America began.

“Yeah, well, we’re supposed to finish this thing before that happens.” Buck rubbed a hand across his eyes. “Which is what I was trying to do. Get them before they can get us. Take down Hydra, take down Hitler. Well, we’re doing it, Steve. We’re doing a damn good job at it, all of us, the Commandos, you and me.” He looked up at Steve, tried to smile, failed. What he didn’t say: _I just wanna finish this thing because I wanna be done. Just want to be done._

Steve was looking at him with his head lowered. He had on that face, all hangdog and sincere. Bucky realized that in the past he’d always been the one to make some physical gesture of reconciliation, an arm across Steve’s back, that Steve was waiting for that. But he couldn’t. He stood there, hands dangling at his sides.

There was that desperate beating thing in his chest again. Thrashing. Like the grouse he’d shot the other day when they’d startled a flock at rest; his finger had jerked (and it _never_ did that) and he had shot it side-on, just hit its wing, been so startled at the idea of shooting a goddamn _bird_ , somehow, like he hadn’t given less thought to shooting a man. But he couldn’t, somehow, when it was just a bird. Flapping around so hard, without hope but not knowing it. The desperate beating thing that had no awareness of anything but the fight it was in. But that wanted... wanted to be alive. Such a dumb animal, fighting so hard, for so little a life.

“You done chewing me out, Cap?” he said after awhile, he wasn’t sure how long. He had this funny feeling like they were playacting this whole thing, like they were kids again. The argument they had playing out over and over and them just swapping sides. He really didn’t see the point.

“You always have to have the last word, Buck,” Steve said. Real quiet. Real rich, too, coming from him. “I’m not going to let you just forget about this, though. You’re acting--you’ve _been_ acting--”

Bucky flinched. “Acting like what?”

Steve was looking at the ground now, shoulders slumped. Steve was _terrible_ at not saying what he was thinking.

Bile mounted in his throat. He thought of it, finally, made himself think about it. What he was acting like. How he almost never slept but was almost never truly tired, either (itchy in his skin). When he did sleep, all those times he woke up saying something and not knowing what it was. He thought how he faded out in the middle of a conversation and came back a beat too late sometimes. But they didn’t talk about it. The whole careful contraption of him and maybe Steve too would shut down, if they did. Like taking out the firing pin in a gun.

He felt pure, black rage for a moment, betrayal, that no matter what he did, how he tried, it wasn’t _good enough_. Just--not enough. “Go ahead and say it, Steve.” Daring him. “That’s right. You can’t say I got the sense knocked out of me because you never had any sense yourself. You got no idea. You’re _still_ an _idiot_.”

“Stop calling me an idiot,” Steve said. It was a tone Bucky had never heard him use on _him_ , his street-brawling tone, low, stubborn.

“‘Cause you’re gonna what.” Bucky tried pushing at his chest. Steve didn’t move. It was like pushing against a granite wall. “You’re gonna what, you’re gonna punch me out like you punched out Hitler?”

Steve actually looked like he was _squaring up to fight_ , fists folding over. Bucky took an automatic step closer, rolling his own shoulders back, chin stuck out, and then he saw that he had it wrong.

Steve wasn’t braced to throw a punch. He was holding himself back, thumbs digging into his palms, holding himself tense.

“Oh please,” Bucky said, eyes sliding away from Steve’s, catching on his mouth, his jaw, the way his pulse twitched at one corner of it. Something pulled at him, that familiar pulse in Steve’s jaw, the tightness of it, the way it concentrated all of him in that one little vein. The life in him. It had been there even before the serum covered it up with armor: a thin, fragile, electric thing.

Steve said, real quiet, “I’m not going to hit you.”

His heart was hammering now and he wasn’t sure why. He had to say something. He said, “You know what, maybe I’m acting nuts, but you’re the one who’s nuts, always have been. You’re ba _na_ nas.”

“Bucky, you’re not--”

“I am. I oughtta be locked up. Wanna make something of it?” Bucky’s hands were on Steve’s collar. He could swear he didn’t know how they got there. “You do, you punk. I know you do.”

Steve’s face went hard and serious the way it did and for a second Bucky really thought he was going to deck him. Had no idea. Just no idea, in the blurry dark, couldn’t make out his expression quite right.

But then Steve took a long shuddering breath and his hands were tight on Bucky’s upper arms and their mouths were on each other’s.

Not kissing. Just biting, scraping teeth, like a fight, like they were trying to shut each other up, like the time Steve had bit down on his shoulder and left sticky toothmarks when they wrestled as kids. He flashed on that, on the naked skin of his own shoulder, and Steve’s teeth. His grabbed at Steve’s collar and dragged him down, twisting the thick fabric tight at his neck, throwing Steve off balance so he stumbled a little, broke away.

Bucky gasped for air; the cold hit his lungs on the deep inhale. Funny how he hadn’t even noticed how cold it was before; how he hadn’t really felt anything. He did now. “Fuck,” he said. “You fight dirty.”

Steve had a hand on his lip. “Me? You bit me.”

“It’ll heal.”

“Fuck you.” Steve didn’t cuss like that nearly as much as Bucky did, but he didn’t sound angry. The words came out quiet, sort of; fond.

“That’s the idea,” Bucky said. He put his hand up to Steve’s lip, pressing on it with his thumb, the spot where he’d bitten invisible already or just out of focus in the dark. He’d put pressure on Steve’s split lips before, wondered why it had been different. Well, it was all different.

Steve sucked in his breath so Bucky’s thumb slipped off his lip, slid over his chin, clumsy. “Are you--are you kidding me?” He sounded raw; hoarse. With that look, like Bucky meant something important, like he couldn’t drag his eyes away. A month of compliments, that look, but. It wasn’t enough anymore.

“Not kidding.” He put his hands on Steve’s waist and he thought, _shit_ , because he didn’t know what he was in for; running his own hands over hips that were, under the thick stuff of his uniform, nothing but skin and muscle. Like stone, like his own, nothing soft over any of it. Nothing that forgave.

Steve was… there was a tremor through him, down his whole body.

“You ever…?” Steve asked.

Bucky looked up at the sky over Steve’s shoulder. He thought about lying. “Nope.”

“Well, okay.”

“Just wanna touch you.” A lie. Bucky thought _I want to take you apart_. _I want to take you_. _I want_ he thought. He was _scared_. He let himself be scared. Tugging at the uniform, the stupid big star on his chest; he undid the fastening at his neck first. Steve smelled sweaty, underneath, pretty rank actually, but in a way he was used to; like lead and sour beer. He put his mouth against the skin of his neck.

“You do--okay. Sure, like--oh.”

* * *

 "Worse'n a brassiere," Bucky said, fumbling with one of the straps on the front while Steve undid the other, then the belt, which fell away with a quiet clink.

"Oh come on--okay, got it--"

"This. Fucking. Outfit." Bucky slid a hand up over Steve's stomach, under the thick red-and-white paneling, stiff and awkward. ( _Fucking Howard Stark_ , he thought). He dug in his nails.

“Thought you liked it,” Steve said faintly.

“I lied.”

* * *

 Steve’s hand on his mouth. The other hand elsewhere. Bucky's belt undone now too. “Be _quiet_.”

“You be quiet.” Muffled. “Oh--” He hissed into Steve’s palm.

* * *

 “Bucky, oh my God.”

“No, sh. _Sh._ Shut _up_ we gotta--”

The power in Steve’s body when he tried to hurry up, finish, Bucky’s hand working on him, his other hand on his neck, tight; tighter when he tried to talk.

* * *

 They put themselves back together after.

“Took too long,” Bucky said, worried, looking up at the moon, how far it had moved across the sky. They had left Dernier and Jones out on first watch. Dernier had been brooding over the skirmish too. Bucky wanted to get back and tell him it was all right, and then he and Steve could take over, let them get some rest.

“I’ll say,” Steve said. Bucky turned to stare at him, shocked at his nonchalance.

“Talk about risks, Steve.” It hit him then what they’d just done. The name for it. Another word he couldn’t say out loud. But it wasn’t _like that_. But it was. Was another thing they couldn’t talk about.

He busied himself with Steve’s uniform instead of thinking, tugged at the collar, brushed at the last fading bite-mark on his neck; watched as it disappeared entirely. “Your hair’s a mess, too.”

“Bucky. It’ll be fine. You’ll see. We’ll just say… we were talking. Tactics.”

“You let me talk, you can’t tell a lie for shit.”

“Sure. Fine, yeah. It’ll be okay.”

“Okay,” Bucky sighed, and they started back. Carefully not touching each other. Walking both of them now on rubbery legs, like they were drunk. While the selfish thrashing thing inside of Bucky beat its wings one more time, even harder, before it folded itself up to rest. The vicious selfish thing inside him that had tasted something now and wanted more. Because it still wasn’t enough. Until this was over. It wasn’t enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -"[During WW I] it was discovered that prognosis was better if the convalescing soldiers [suffering from PTSD] remained in the setting of the military hierarchy, rather than in a more relaxed hospital environment.” [(source)](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181586/)  
> -Steve's 'oh my god' is an homage to the amazing AnnaFugazzi's Don't Ask, Don't Tell.  
> -Many thanks to [mostfacinorous](http://archiveofourown.org/users/MostFacinorous/pseuds/MostFacinorous) for help with Project Unwrap Cap, i.e. how the heck the uniform comes undone anyway.


	5. Chapter 5

He still thought sometimes, quite sincerely, that the rules of reality no longer governed everything he saw and did. That it might all be a dream. The war. Everything since the metal table. There was much of the dreamlike in how he fixated on certain things, details, zooming in, panning out, like the camera shots in _Citizen Kane_. His vision had the telescopic zaniness of hallucination or the elation of fantasy or the crawling relentlessness of nightmare. Dreamlike dread lingered like a taste on the back of his tongue. He had the unmoored sense that someone else steered his will. The feeling that desires might became real as soon as you thought of them, but that disaster might, too.

The feeling that no future existed. He walked on the tightrope between moments. It pitched and swayed, so that one moment drew itself out, his gut plunging--and another lurched forward to take its place, suddenly twanging double-time. Like the bridge, back at Kreischberg. Like he’d never gotten off it.

On the outside he and Steve acted just the same, he thought. Wary of touching each other in front of the others, but they had been standoffish since the serum. So he supposed it was no different. Anyhow, they had plenty else to think about. It wasn’t important what they got up to in the dark, always careful, always quiet. Not putting a name to it helped. It just _was_. What they did… it eased the itch under his skin a little. Replaced it with a faint, constant queasiness.

* * *

 They took orders from Colonel Phillips and Agent Carter by radio more often now. There was talk of Schmidt. They got closer to finding him with every base they turned over. Most times the same story, any potential informants done in by their own hand, documents burned, but they got enough to piece together stepping stones, more missions. Jones worked out codes with Agent Carter.

Some of the things they found knocked them flat. Experiments. Even just notes on experiments. Records of prison camps even worse than theirs, and not just for soldiers.

Morita had snapped the other day, reading a list they had dug up, started pounding his fist into a tree. Bucky had to take him for a walk around the perimeter before he hurt himself. Reminded him of his brother back home. How Phillips had pulled strings to get him out of Colorado River and into Oberlin; how it would be better, after the war. He said that, wishing he could imagine it.

Morita said, “Yeah, just him. Just him.... That list of names. Ages.” He spat, cleared his throat, spat again.

Bucky said, “Yeah.” Had known not to say much more. He gave him the last of his bedraggled pack of smokes. Let him rant, things he had been afraid to say in front of everyone else. Listened. Watched him pull himself together and quiet himself down.

That day was unusual; they didn’t usually talk like that, not straight out.

They had become men of few words, he thought. All quieter than they had been, but all felt the flavor of what was meant and unsaid. At other times they were men of many, but those meant less. Were nothing but warmth and friction, filling the cold air.

* * *

 A week ago, Bucky’d had to shoot a man in a Hydra base who had tried to kill himself and failed, hand shaking on the trigger when he put it to his temple. The half-dead German had lain there twitching, still moving, eyes tracking, his brain visible through his blown-off skull. Blood coming out in stuttering pulses like it was being pumped by a broken machine. It had been hard to finish him, harder than making a clean kill. But. Bucky had felt he had to.  

The next time he’d come across a soldier still alive on the floor, throat half-crushed by Steve’s shield, all he thought was, _waste of a bullet_ and he used his knife. Moved on.

The clean kills he didn’t remember as well, very rarely thought of them at all. They were just numbers, like a batting average. His was excellent.

* * *

 The weather had warmed some where they were, close to the Italian border again, almost back at base.

Sitting in their tent after a radio conference, watching as Steve finished drawing out a map, Bucky said, “Erskine.”

Steve looked up from what he was doing. He sat hunched over, looking almost like he’d used to when drawing back home--dirty undershirt and all. He had taken a hit to the left shoulder and had it wrapped up with gauze.

He was in pain. Bucky knew that from the lines on his forehead, which cut deeper than usual. Felt a strange way about that nowadays, Steve in pain. Almost glad of it. _Good. Remember that,_ was what he thought, _Learn a lesson, damn it, be more careful next time._ He felt that way sometimes--that same way--when they--when he--

\--Steve making noises through his teeth. Bucky almost panicking the first time, wondering if Steve had done this before, unable to ask. _”No keep going,”_ Steve had said, _”C’mon Buck, I can take--”_ and Bucky had clapped a hand tight over his mouth and finished, viciously fast.

“Yeah?” Steve said now, twisting carefully to look at him.

“You said.” Bucky slouched against the tent pole, legs in a sprawl, wishing for a bath. He stunk. “You said Erskine said the serum made good into great and bad into worse. But no one’s just good or bad, are they.”

“He said that it magnified what we already had inside. Still don’t know what that means completely, I guess.”

“Oh.”

“I wish… I wish you could’ve met him.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said.

Steve blew out a breath. “So. We rendezvous in three days at the base; kind of a march but we’ll push through if Dernier’s leg holds up.”

“Should make it,” Bucky said. “Geez. I can’t wait to eat real food and take a shower. See some faces that aren’t our own dumb mugs.”

“Not sick of your dumb mug yet,” Steve said, looking at him _that way_. Still made him feel funny, that look, like he ought to pretend not to see it.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, standing up, brushing himself off.

* * *

 The first thing the Commandos did upon making it to base was report in. Dernier got his leg looked at and flirted with the nurses, breaking out his most outrageous accent. Dum Dum immediately departed to scout for liquor. Bucky got to take not a shower but a _bath_ , turning the water in the makeshift tub someone had scrounged up gray, and still didn’t want to get out. Steve stopped in to check on him.

“I’ve got to talk to Colonel Phillips, but you can stay,” he said, smiling, Bucky guessed, at the boneless way he lolled in the water, one foot over the edge of the tub. “You look comfortable.”

“Don’t wanna miss anything important...” But he was warm, and floating, and tired.

“You won’t, we’ll officially debrief tomorrow.”

“All right.” Bucky rolled his head to the side, looking at Steve, eyes half-open. “You go… you go spend some time with Peggy, all right?”

“What?”

Like Bucky had to tell _him_ about it. The way he sounded on the radio with her, even checking in. Those goddamn stars in his eyes, like Bucky didn’t know about that. “Y’ought to. You’ll like it.”

“But I thought we’d go for a, a walk or something--”

“Nah, Rogers, c’mon. Plenty of people here for me to shoot the breeze.” A warning. “I won’t miss ya.”

“Well.” Steve paused. “All right.”

* * *

 At dinner the Commandos almost made themselves sick eating, begged for second and third helpings. Held court at their table, enjoying the cachet their names had among the other soldiers, telling loud stories.

“--And then the Captain threw his shield at the gunner, and--”

“Dernier rigged it so the whole thing just crumbled, right out of the side of the mountain.”

“ _Pardonne_ , Gabriel forgets that he single-handedly broke the code that had half of the Americans, how do you say, stumped--”

“--said ‘Heil Hitler’ and I said, hell to _that_ \--”

“That time we mined the road and Barnes took down seventeen men…”

“‘Scuse me, twenty- _four_ ,” Bucky said.

He had used to love this, the easy smiles. Now he saw the quiet behind them (some of them) and he had to jolt himself back into his old animation, like the flicker of a stopped picture reel. Straightened up, brushed his hair into place. Maybe once he was drunk, it would be easier.

* * *

 Drunk was better, he thought. He hadn’t been able to eat much at dinner but he’d drunk a lot, more’n Dugan even.

Dernier had to report back to the medical tent, crutch under his arm, Gabe helping him. He had some kind of infection, a fever they had to keep an eye on, but he would be all right. The rest of them wandered the camp. Bucky weaved along, Dum Dum and Monty and Morita trying to sing something at him that mostly petered out into hiccupping laughter. He’d long since slung his jacket over his shoulder and they all looked a mess, but some of the soldiers they passed still stood up to salute them. It felt good, warm, the acknowledgement.

He staggered sideways, bumping into Morita, who elbowed him. Dum Dum had waxed his mustache. Bucky yanked at one side of it, the other one already forlornly uncurled. They were _fine_ , they were _all right_. He took another drink from their bottle, handed it over to Monty.

They passed a campfire, a group of airmen hunkered down around it, talking in a hushed way that made him stop to listen, a word tripping something wound up tight inside him.

“--heard Ellis finally got booted for fruiting around--”

“Did it on purpose. Wanted to go home… drafted late, guess they’re taking anyone--”

“Fucking coward.”

“Eh, whaddya ’spect--”

Smoke swirled overhead, dizzily stretched against the sky, the smell of smoke and skin, alcohol and bile in his throat.

Bucky made it about eight steps and threw up messily into a bush.

“Sarge?” Dum Dum thumped him on the back. Bucky heaved again, wetly, choking. Wiped at his mouth.

“Agh,” he said. Shit they were looking at him they were-- “S’awright I just--” The sound of his heart loud in his skull, a roaring. He could barely hear himself talk and didn’t want to hear himself think. “Be fine,” he said, spitting a long clear string, wiping his mouth, staring at it. Telescoping in on it, the spit on the back of his own hand. He took a breath and stood up, braced himself.

“Get some rest,” Monty said. He was the least drunk of all of them, or just so damn British it seemed that way. “Bright new day tomorrow.”

Morita was looking at him in a way Bucky didn’t like. He swallowed.

“Be all right,” he said, waving them off. “I’m gonna… shoot.” He couldn’t go back to the tent he’d set up to share _with Steve_ , shit shit shit his heart pounding and he counted silently in his head to make the roaring go away; it didn’t, but it quieted. “‘M gonna go and… go.”

“Need a hand?”

“No. Fine. I’m fine.”

* * *

 He went to the medical tent, telling himself he was just going to check on Dernier, stepped inside. There was a new nurse; not the one Dernier had been wooing, but a shorter brunette. Bucky looked at her dazedly as she stopped him, one hand out.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m afraid--oh.” She recognized him. “Sergeant Barnes.”

“In the flesh,” he said, smiling with one side of his mouth. “How’s that buddy’a mine? Taking good care of him?”

“A little drunk,” she said, “but fine once we changed his dressings. I think he’s asleep.”

“Oh. Hey, thank you. Say,” like he’d just thought of it. “What’s your name, doll?”

She stopped, looked at him carefully.

“Sergeant,” she said, “You are also more than a little drunk.”

“I just--”

“I’m trying to take care of these men.”

 _Well shit_. He covered his eyes with his hands. Shut them, trying to get the room to stop spinning. He found himself sitting on a cot, a cup of water in his hands, the nurse--what was her _name_ \--looking down at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, aware of how pitiful it sounded, not caring. He looked at the cup in his hand, wondered how he’d got it; drank it. Stood up, shook his head, handing it back. “Ma’am. Apologies.” Because he wouldn’t sleep anyway. So instead he got up and left. He wasn’t tired, not really. Just drunk, just floundering, just blinded and dumb even inside his head. _Fucking coward. What do you expect_.

So he just walked, aimless, while the drink cleared from his blood and the ache in the pit of his stomach turned from knotted to empty, and his pulse slowed and sped up and slowed and he counted, under his breath, up to several thousand Mississippi.

* * *

 He got back to their tent before dawn and steeled himself, looking inside.

“Buck?” Steve said sleepily, rolling over.

He didn’t say anything, just went to his cot, sat down on it. “Sh.” He wasn’t… just couldn’t think anymore. Still dark outside. He lay down, suddenly exhausted. The moment pulsed, elongated, elapsed, and when he opened his eyes, Steve was bent over him.

“You all right?” Pause; he probably smelled his breath. “Threw up?”

“Little bit.”

“You were out all night, I was worried…”

“Making time with a WAC,” Bucky muttered, shutting his eyes. Opened them, looked at Steve, who stood over him still. There was a look on his face like he’d been socked in the gut. “Hot little number. ‘Bout time, fella gets awful tired of just making do.”

Steve’s mouth shut itself into a thin, hard line, twisted down at one corner.

Silence. Steve gathering himself, Bucky could just feel it, he always took some time to think of what he was gonna say and then when he did--

“If this is about Peggy,” he said. “We just talked, Buck. Just talked about… it was good, I got my head clear, but you know. It’s not like that.”

“Well why the hell not,” Bucky said, making himself roll over, sit up, hands tight on the edge of the cot. “Are you that fucking queer.”

“What.” Steve’s whole body contracted, like someone had cut the strings, like the serum had reversed. Which: yeah. Bad things worse. The lines between his eyebrows deep.

“You heard me.” Bucky stood up, grabbed his pack where he’d set it by the foot of his cot, not looking at Steve. “I’m gonna go bunk with Dugan. Tired of tryin’a deal with your--”

“No,” Steve said, stubborn, Bucky could feel the tautness, him trying to control himself. “You’re kidding, stop it. Something happened you’re not telling me.”

“Shut the _fuck_ up.” Pack slung over his shoulder, hand on the tent flap. He could hear birds chirping outside, maybe an hour from reveille. The chirping sounded so loud, all of a sudden.

“But,” Steve said blankly. “But I told Peggy.”

Bucky froze. “You told Peggy what.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Oberlin is famous for its historical support of students of color and [did take Japanese-American students during WW II](http://oberlin.edu/alummag/fall2013/internmentstudents.html).  
> -Thanks to [mostfacinorous](http://archiveofourown.org/users/MostFacinorous/pseuds/MostFacinorous) for providing most of the dialogue Bucky overhears from the airmen.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An interlude from Steve's POV, filling in his talk with Peggy; takes place the same night as the previous chapter.

They sat in the corner of the command tent after Phillips had gone for the evening, loudly announcing his departure. He had also commented upon the pathetic state of Steve’s dress uniform and muttered about no respect for protocol and Rogers you’d better polish up tomorrow, but it had been an oddly dampened version of his usual bluster. So just Steve and Peggy and a small table, strewn with maps he had drawn and brought back. Lamplight. There were jewel colors here, warm and melting, colors he thought he hadn’t seen in months (and hadn’t seen for a lifetime, before that).

“Do I have to _answer_ the fanmail?” Steve was saying.

“They’ve been sending signed copies of the comics back. I’m sure no one expects you even to read them.”

“I just don’t want to miss anything. Mrs. Barnes sends their letters in with Bucky’s now, but I know things slip through. Geez, the _comics_ ,” Steve said. “The hell I catch for those.”

They talked about everything. Amazing how easy it had gotten to talk to her, maybe after all those short bursts on the radio. Short enough to be weightless, demanding nothing, always tinged with the businesslike relief of what they’d been discussing before. So now he could talk about just about anything: how he knew he was the Captain but how all the Commandos covered his blind spots and inexperience without realizing it, or without making bones about it, anyhow. How on fire he felt not to make a mistake, not to let anyone get hurt. He talked about how he had lost count of how many times they had all saved each other’s lives, how they’d never even think of stopping to count. It was just something they did, that they knew they’d do for each other.

(But he did, sometimes, remember exactly how many times Bucky had saved him).

He could talk about anything with Peggy, it felt like--almost anything.

They talked about Peggy’s time in France, about the spy code-named Garbo and the rising excitement among the Allies. About what they thought could happen in the war. They didn’t talk about after the war, but came close enough that it felt like they had, so close they could taste hope, but not drink it down.

Steve talked about things he missed about New York, the bustle outside the picture houses, the noises at night that were the opposite of the watchful silence around them out in the field. He wasn’t ever, he said, going to be a country boy. But he said it was hard to feel he missed home when he had this new body to live in, like it made even the awful winter marches somehow better and brighter than a lot of what he’d had before. He felt a mixed way about that, the joy in his new body set up against the suffering he knew everyone else felt. (His happiness about _everything_ , nowadays, came with that kind of guilt. He couldn’t help it. It was like some inner furnace had roared on, bringing both the sting and the relief of high heat.)

“They have it harder than I do, but we’re all doing the same thing,” he tried to explain.

Peggy asked him: “Well, how did you feel, when you were on the other end of it?”

And Steve said, “Good point.”

* * *

 “So then the news crew comes and we’re all tired and have to cheer up. Monty goes, ‘It’ll be a lark!’” Steve said, trying a British accent, which made Peggy snort. “And I said, ‘More of a lame duck.’”

“Steve, that’s... truly awful.”

“That bad?”

“Possibly the worst I’ve heard,” she said, giving it due consideration, “But an earnest effort.”

“Like a stupid line out of the comics, right? That’s not even the best part, because then Bucky said ‘Quit your grousing.’”

He was trying. He really was, though he wasn’t sure what exactly he was trying to do. He thought about how he’d learned how to flirt from watching Bucky, and realized suddenly: a lot of that wasn’t _real_. He’d seen real, now, not the discomfort of trying to string together words that didn’t fit.

“I saw that newsreel,” Peggy said, not laughing anymore, leaning one elbow on the table. He could see how she made an effective interrogator, because it was almost impossible to look away. “Your compass, Steve? I had no idea.”

He felt the shock of sudden guilt. She had seen her picture in it. Of course she had, he remembered taking it out while they were filming, remembered... remembered, among other things, how Bucky had abruptly stopped laughing.

His fingers closed on the cold metal in his pocket and he drew it out, put it on the table; she flicked it open.

He’d looked at her picture so many times it was odd seeing it against her actual presence. Uncomfortable, like the niggling feeling he got when he looked at a drawing and it didn’t match up quite with what he’d intended. Steve remembered when he’d taken it, on a whim, not even thinking ( _geez, Steve, you never think things through_ ). He’d just wanted something to remind him of her. He remembered the time she’d kissed him. It was a could-have-been, an almost.

Until now, he hadn’t even thought about it as something that demanded he make a choice. But he _knew_. He _knew_ the right thing, when he saw it. He felt it, when the fighter that was his conscience had him on the ropes.

“I don’t recall giving that to you,” Peggy said, twirling it idly on the table under one fingertip. The little needle juddered, pointing unerringly to the north, while the metal casing spun.

“I shouldn’t have taken it,” Steve said. “I know.”

“It’s quite all right.” She halted the compass, turned it toward her, and examined the picture of her own face consideringly. “If you’d asked, I might have given you a better one.”

“Peggy,” he said, and floundered, unable to continue.

“Steve.” She wrinkled her nose at him. “Really.”

The moment passed, and Steve said, “It isn’t right.”

“It’s only a picture. I appreciate the gallantry, but surely we’re beyond that, don’t you think?”

“It’s not the picture,” he said, trying to get his head around what he was trying to say. He kept thinking how he’d promised to be a good man. What did good men do?

He had known men, back at home, who split their lives in half. Now he remembered it with particular acuteness. Men with a distance to their expressions, a kind of perpetual snarl of fear. Men who went to the Y, or the clubs in the Village or Harlem, or hung around the docks or the parks at night. Married to women who looked the other way. It had been different back home, for him anyway. He’d had to be very careful where he went after Mayor La Guardia came down hard on the clubs before the World’s Fair, so there hadn't been much, really. For awhile there had been Charlie. And then the worry had been about losing his chance to join the army. That was when he’d started going on all those double dates with Bucky, who was, he guessed, looking out for him like always. But he’d never given any of them ideas.

 _Steve wasn’t like those men_. For one thing, it wasn’t exactly like that for him. He saw that he could love Peggy, that maybe he even did, that he had a choice--but he’d made his choice.

“I try to do the right thing,” he said. “You know… how this all started, going off to rescue the 107th. To rescue Bucky, actually,” he said. “You helped me be brave enough to do that. And then… then we decided to keep fighting, and it just wasn't easy, Peggy. Not on any of us, I guess. It’s not wrong, is it, to be there for someone who needs you? Even if it’s against the rules? To try to be--not just a perfect soldier.”

“I’m not sure I follow.” Her voice was wary, the playfulness gone, the sense of ease with it.

Steve steeled himself. “Please promise you aren’t going to shoot me this time.”

He saw how squarely she held her shoulders, how upright. “Oh,” she said. “I see.” Her lips twisting a little to one side. “Howard even said,” she murmured, in disbelief. She lifted her chin, met his eyes. “Barnes. You and Barnes?”

“It was only after,” he said.

“I need a moment, please,” Peggy said. She braced her hands on the table, stood, tugging her skirt into place. Her hands knotted tight. He watched the lines of her body, the way she moved abruptly, bracing herself. In command of herself, self-contained, or trying to be. Steve stood too, wanting to follow her.

At last: “Brave of you, to tell me.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just realized I had to. I think I just figured out,” he said, “what it is, with Bucky. I thought it was two different things, but I guess--I _know_ \--it’s not. I know it’s not fair to you.” He stood, fumbled for the compass again, started to take it out, holding it out to her. “I could give this back, if you want.”

She took it, silently, and walked back to the table. He watched while she bent over, picked up a pen, opened the compass. The needle pointing true north. She slid out the picture, turned it over, and wrote something on the back in tiny, fierce strokes. When she was done, she turned to him, holding it out on the flat of her palm.

“Keep it.” She was clear-eyed and mostly calm. The corner of her lip quivered, just a little. “Please. And it isn't like I haven't had practice, keeping secrets, so you needn't worry about that.”

“I trust you.”

Steve felt relieved, and confused at his relief, thinking, again, something that hurt less for him. He wasn't used to that.

When he opened the compass later and looked inside to read, he saw she had written:

_I could not love you, dear, so much  
Loved I not honor more._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -'The spy code-named Garbo'--[Juan Pujol Garcia](http://www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-double-agents-d-day-victory.htm).  
> -[To Lucasta, going to the Wars](http://www.bartleby.com/101/343.html).


	7. Chapter 7

“You told Carter _what_.” Bucky’s whole body had gone the kind of numb it went after battle or blood loss or a hard run. The shiver of pinpricks swarmed his limbs; he dropped his pack and barely noticed.

“I told her about us,” Steve said, “She took it really well, Bucky… I mean… she said she wouldn’t tell anyone or anything. She _understood_.”

“She’s a better man than I am,” Bucky muttered, feeling sick. “Jesus, Steve. You just throw away every goddamn good thing you get.”

Steve had drawn himself up, into that posture he had worn at even half this size, his body merely punctuation to his conviction. Now he filled that space the way he filled that stupid uniform, hard to ignore even in just the grubby underwear he’d slept in. “You’re _wrong_ , Bucky. I’m trying to hold onto the best thing I’ve got,” he said.

He couldn’t take it, the heat of Steve’s eyes on him. He thought, _selfish_. He thought, _wrong_. He thought, _all twisted up inside_. He didn’t know which of them he was thinking those things about. He thought, _God, it’s all my fault, it’s all my fault_.

“The best thing you’ve got?” he said, dizzy with it, the words on his tongue like the aftertaste of alcohol, sweetness that had rotted down to a burn. He grabbed for Steve, a hand on the waistband of his shorts, yanking him closer. “This.”

Steve reached up toward his jaw, touching the line of it, rough where he hadn’t yet shaved. He said, “Yeah, this, Bucky,” leaning down to him, lips searching.

Bucky reached into Steve’s shorts, bunched his fist over Steve’s cock, and squeezed. Tight enough for it to hurt. His thumb and forefinger pinching at the slick head of him until he felt a twitch, a tremor, knew Steve had got a jolt of electric-sting pain. His other hand locked on Steve’s neck, holding their faces close. “Me _fucking you_ is the best thing you got.” He spit the words back into Steve’s mouth. Said it. What it was. 

Steve made a wounded noise deep in his throat, but came forward to put his lips on Bucky’s, and Bucky caught him, their mouths pressed tight. He tasted the harshness of Steve’s breath, the heat. They broke away, and he let go the grip of his fist, too. Steve said, “No, _you_ are, just.”

“Yeah, well, you got me, here we are, now what’re we gonna do,” Bucky said, thinking, _Sometimes I wish you hadn’t pulled me out of Kreischberg, I swear to God; sometimes I think it was a Devil’s bargain._ “Tell me you liked that,” eyes flicking down, then up, sick at himself, thinking _coward_ , thinking _I could save him but it would ruin him, he would hate me_ , while the dark thing inside him howled. "Tell me you  
want--”

“I did,” Steve admitted, “I do, I want--”

“What.” Bucky maneuvered them backwards, toward Steve’s cot, crowding him, boxing him in merely by motion, by the navigation of posture and long habit; not touching him. Steve yielded to Bucky now--since the serum, _pulling his punches_ \--afraid, Bucky knew, to hurt him. Of his strength. And used to letting him take the lead, too. When Steve put up a hand again, reaching for him, Bucky pushed him back: a short sharp shove at his chest, until he sat down abruptly on his cot, legs splayed. Bucky put a hand on his sternum and exerted pressure, negotiating him down to a lying position. The bottom of his shirt rode up, and his ribs moved like a scared animal’s. Shallow breaths.

“Want. Whatever you want,” Steve said, craning his neck up to see Bucky dropping slowly to his knees. He pulled at Steve’s shorts, sliding them over the jut of his cock and down his legs, over his feet, which Steve picked up obligingly, before he had to ask. Just so goddamn biddable, now of all times.

“Maybe I should fuck you where everyone can see,” Bucky said, his voice remote. “Whaddya think, Steve? Since you’re telling everybody anyhow.”

“No,” Steve said, bewildered, trying to look at him again. “What’re you talking about--”

“Sh,” Bucky said, pressing a hand to the muscles of Steve’s abdomen as they bunched, easing him back down. “Forget about it.”

“Okay, I just…”

“Forget it, I talk a lot of shit.” Trailed his fingertips over the indent above Steve’s hip. 

“You… keep going, all right.”

Bucky knelt between Steve’s legs, moved one hand up the muscle of his right calf, the tender inside of his knee. A pinch there always had made him ticklish, so Bucky dug in his thumb where the teardrop of his quadricep met his kneecap, felt his leg jerk. Then put his lips to the skin there, tasting it, the fine springy itch of hair, the jumpy muscle at the inside of his thigh. He paused on the spot where the bullet had gone weeks ago. There was no scar, but he remembered exactly the place, remembered the red inside, and he battened his lips to it and lingered there, while the muscle spasmed again. Ran his thumb up to the femoral artery, where he’d held it tight, where he’d felt the blood fighting to get out. Scraped his nail over it, the branching roots of blood under the skin. Then over the vein of his cock, which made Steve let out a muffled noise. He’d still never put his mouth on him, though Steve had, for him. 

“You don’t gotta,” Steve said. 

“Shuttup.”

Tentative, _tongue like bubble gum in his mouth_ , tried doing it like he’d felt it and wasn’t used to it, thought about what he must look like and the pressure on his throat. He had to pause, gagging a little; closed his eyes.

“You okay,” hand drifting down to Bucky’s hair.

Like he could talk. Bucky dragged his lips up Steve’s cock, made a guttural sound of reassurance.

“S’okay, s’enough,” Steve said, strained, hips shifting.

Bucky took a long breath, then, and pushed himself back, undid his own pants, held himself with the same hand he’d had on Steve. Who was looking up at him, now, staring. 

“Can you,” Steve started, shook his head, “Lemme see you, just, lemme,” shifting up onto his elbows, looking embarrassed; by asking to see him, after everything else? Jesus. He was sitting up, reaching for him, tugging at his jacket, hungry, like he couldn’t stop himself. Undoing the buttons, sliding his hands inside.

“It’s cold,” Bucky objected, though he didn’t really feel it.

“Not that cold.” The way Steve looked down, all innocent. Bucky almost laughed, and let Steve help him shrug out of his coat, shuck off his shirt, almost ripping it when it caught on one elbow, his eyes following the path of his hands, running over Bucky’s body with rapt intent. Then just still. Their eyes locked, Steve’s hands firm on his hips. A pause. 

Bucky set his knee between Steve’s legs, hovered over him, guided him down onto his back; pulled away from his hands and took Steve’s wrists in his. He pinned them at his sides ( _stitching against his fingers, no his arms, no--_ ) and held them there. The tip of his own cock brushing Steve’s belly, now, and the lightness of the touch... that almost hurt too, he thought. 

“Come on,” Steve said. “Please, Bucky, you can, you’re…..” Hitching up his hips.

“The best thing you got,” Bucky said.

“Yeah, always,” Steve said.

“You want me to fuck you.” 

“I want you--” 

“ _Steve_ \--”

“--to fuck me.”

“All right,” Bucky said, pushing himself back onto his knees, spitting into his hand. Like they were about to seal a pact.


	8. Chapter 8

They didn’t have much time. Bucky drifted into a doze anyway, tucked around the warmth of Steve’s broad back, face buried in the sweaty nape of his neck. No more thoughts, now. Just the silence of darkness lifting outside. A thrumming silence, like the hum of air inside an inflating balloon while it filled, ready to drift away. He screwed his eyes more tightly shut when anxiety tried to drag them open, and felt Steve’s chest move in and out beneath the arm he’d thrown over him. Trying not to count the seconds in his head.

But the bugles sounded and they both snapped to, Steve lurching upright so he almost catapulted them both off the cot. Bucky rolled off after him. He ignored the sudden crushing headache of fatigue that caught him on his way up. Efficiently, he yanked on pants and boots and flapped his way into his shirt, tucking the metal of his dog tags inside. They were warm where they’d been pressed between him and Steve.

Stumbling outside, he blinked at the purple-blue sky, dazzled by one long streak of yellow. Frost in the air hit the top of his lungs, clogged his nose, stung. He stood at parade rest, listening to the last sounds of the bugle’s cheerful, plaintive burble. Steve came out after him, blinking hard, and planted himself a careful two feet away. His chin uplifted, looking out. To where the distant flag now snapped and curled in the wind.

“Phillips said report in at 0900,” Steve told him, while they ducked back inside the tent. “I think he’s taking it easy on us because of Dernier. Or he knows how much all of you had to drink last night.”

“Nah, then he’d have had us come in first thing, for discipline’s sake.”

“Fair enough,” Steve allowed, turning--at the mention of discipline--to strip his bed and remake it, tucking the clean sheet in tight.

“Well, good,” Bucky said, rubbing at his eyes, seeing stars against the insides of his lids; stars and _stripes_ , even. The tired ache in him crested like a wave and crashed to shore, and he let it ebb away, all of it. Shook his head. “As is, we got time for a shower.” He eyed Steve, who was straightening up, satisfied at his job well done. “Cold shower.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s the only kind they’ve got,” Steve said, but he had one corner of his mouth turned up.

“And let me fix your uniform this time, so Phillips doesn’t chew all our heads off.”

“Hey, same for you.”

Bucky realized it was true, he had gotten careless about his appearance out in the field. He remembered when that hadn’t been so. “Sure,” he said.

“We better get going.” Steve rolled his shoulders, slung a towel over one arm; threw Bucky’s at him. He caught it, deftly. They were back to distance now, a tight and staticky space between them that he could feel on his skin. “We should take Jones along too, so he doesn’t get hassled like last time.”

“Think we’ve got more respect now, but yeah--always gonna be _some_ assholes,” Bucky said, articulating a long-held philosophy. One that went along with the idea that he and Steve had better deal with them together.

Odd how they fell straight back into their rhythm (well, just slightly askew). Unspeakable things, hitching them together, while they just went on, clockwork parts ticking their rhythm in a big machine. In the light of day, Bucky didn’t even know why he’d thought or said half the things he had, anymore, anyhow.

“But,” Steve said, just before they left, and Bucky thought, _wait, no_. “Tonight we’re gonna… talk some things over, okay? Just us. I think we’ve got letters from home, too, we can read those, we can talk.”

He could’ve said something smart (talk, is that what you’re calling it) but he didn’t. He just nodded, looking down.

* * *

 They were all of them in rough shape at the meeting, Steve the only clear-eyed one and Dernier still balancing on one crutch before they sat down. The good news: he and Steve stood up to Phillips’s grudging inspection. The bad: Bucky hadn’t thought what it would be like to sit at a long table with Steve to his right, Agent Carter and Howard Stark straight across. He had to retreat into his best neutral look--and he knew from the shit he’d taken in basic that a neutral expression didn’t come naturally to him--and fold his hands on the table in front of him. Felt like he did this all the time now, wore his face like a mask and his body like it didn’t belong to him.

“This,” Howard Stark said, holding up one of the small glowing components they had liberated from the Hydra base they’d found in Carniola, in a labyrinthine bunker buried under the rubble of a town. “This,” he said again, examining it at arm’s length as if it were a personal affront to him, “Should not be possible.”

“Who found it?” Phillips said.

And Steve said, with pride Bucky wished he couldn’t hear, “Sergeant Barnes did.”

 _Doing a last sweep and he came across a German shivering behind a hidden panel. Had heard the rough sound of his breath, the living throb of him. Ripped open the panel, surprised at how easy the metal bent. A guy in a lab coat, not a soldier. He had held out the thing in his hand and looked at Bucky and said,_ “Ich ergebe mich.”

 _Bucky knew what that meant._ "Was ist das," _he said, and the man said,_ "Ich weiss nicht, ich weiss nicht, bitte--" _He kept his pistol out, grabbed the thing with his free hand, and took three, four careful steps back, watching the man shiver. Felt a moment of revulsion at the German’s wet eyes. Said, “Fuck you,” and shot._

_When he’d come out he had handed the little metal thing to Steve and Steve had said, “All clear in there?”_

_And Bucky said, “Yeah,” and Steve had said, “Good job,” and tucked it away and Bucky had thought, as he did when these things happened: how much did he want to fool Steve, and how much did Steve want to fool himself._

“What is it?” Steve said now, at the same time as Bucky said, “Is it something we can use? --Sorry, Captain,” deferring to him.

“It’s an explosive,” Howard said, and Dernier leaned out on his crutch to take a closer look. _Oh great,_ Bucky thought, resignedly, _I handed Steve a bomb and he’s been carrying it around in his pocket_. “And it may be the most powerful one known to man,” Stark said, and added, "Yet." Bucky found himself caught between wanting to roll his eyes at the blarney and thinking, _Christ._

“Carter, Jones, you found any mention of this thing,” Phillips said.

“There didn’t seem to be any notes on its actual development,” Carter said.

“Almost as if it came out of nowhere,” Jones ventured. “The communication Morita intercepted mentioned ‘found’ instead of ‘made,’ but--” He turned to Dernier.

“The extra pieces,” Dernier said, pointing, “Those were made, you can see.”

“Yes, I can see that,” Howard said with some impatience, turning the thing over in his hand. “Without removing the item at the core, though--I’d have to do some work on it…”

“If you blow up my base, Stark,” Colonel Phillips barked. “I’ll have your head on a plate.”

“What’s left of it,” Bucky couldn’t help adding.

Phillips went on, gathering steam “--on a plate, for breakfast, with a stack of toast to mop up the brains that have clearly _leaked right out of your tiny little God-damned ears_.”

“I’m sure Howard would never do such a thing,” Peggy said, with the amusement-tinged impatience of one used to Phillips’s bluster. Bucky saw her eyes flick to Steve’s, their small shared glance, and he had to turn and stare at the green pins in the map. Their profusion. The symbol of the missions they’d accomplished in these months, pinned to the table like the bodies of bugs.

“Can you test it safely,” Steve said, shifting in his seat so his body turned toward Bucky; maybe acknowledging, finally, his point of view.

“Maybe. Possibly not here.” It looked like it physically pained Stark to admit an inability.

“Figure it out,” Phillips said, “You’re supposed to be a genius. Now, moving on. What’s the situation on tracking Schmidt?”

“We’ve narrowed it down to three locations,” Peggy said. She bent efficiently over the map spread across the table, placed a hand on a pin in Ukraine, then on one in the Balkans, and on another near the Alps.

* * *

 They did have letters from home. Bucky had three, envelopes thick enough that he could tell his Ma and Lizzie had sent something for Steve too, like he’d asked. Becca had even sent him candy: tootsie rolls and a battered Baby Ruth. Because she’d written that she and Joe were going to have a kid. He stood there by the mail tent winded, the letter half-unfolded in his hand. Morita walked by, and Bucky said,

“Hey, I’m gonna be an uncle,” not believing it; the letter was from almost two months ago.

“Good job,” Morita said. “Congratulations.”

“Want to trade, I could use a smoke,” Bucky said, holding out the candy bar, because he still felt the air sucked out of him and wanted something to shove it back in.

Then he saw one difference. Something that had been shifted from last night. Because Morita didn’t give his usual rough smile. Instead he just said, “Okay, Sarge.” And stood back from him a step. Bucky felt his throat close up. Took four smokes from the pack Morita held out at arm’s length, handed him the candy, and though he’d been going to, didn’t ask him about his family.

Morita still must have told the Commandos his news, because they all surprised him with a toast at dinner.

“That’s something worth fighting for,” said Dum Dum, holding up a flask of what had tasted, when Bucky’d tried it, exactly like rubbing alcohol mixed with apple juice. “The Barnes line will live on!”

“No, _Dum_ Dum,” Bucky said, “It’s the Nelson line--” Though he’d hardly gotten used to that, Rebecca Nelson, since Becca and Joe had married right before he shipped out; so he could be there for the wedding, actually. That day had passed by so quick, all uncles who kept coming over to shake his hand and he’d taken Becca for the very second dance, remembering the way he'd taught her to waltz around the living room. He remembered it the way he remembered everything from home these days, in a blur that he tried to shove back as soon as possible. Forcing himself through memory like sped-up film, not letting himself stop to feel anything, to want.

“Oh, well, guess it’s on you,” Dum Dum said unabashedly.

Bucky made himself laugh.

Monty told them how his girl had sent pictures, not that he was going to show any of them; and they gave him a hard time about that. Dum Dum said his wife wanted Steve’s autograph. For a _friend_ of hers, he said. Who _had_ sent a picture Steve could see.

Steve was being quiet. He looked up and barely smiled, at that.

Still flying high off the the morning’s briefing, and what Peggy had shared about new developments in France, Dernier said, “After the war, I am going to own a farm.”

“Not the best of all possible worlds, but it sounds good to me,” Jones said, obviously talking about something he and Dernier both knew and Bucky didn’t. It irked him, not knowing.

“After the war maybe I’ll go back to school and learn where you come up with shit like that,” Bucky said, surprised after the fact that he’d said that. He hadn’t even thought the words 'after the war' for as long as he could remember.

“It’s from this book,” Jones said. “About this guy who’s an idealist. He’s raised that way, thinking this is the best world there can be. Because it’s the only world there is. Anyway, he goes off to the wars and sees how it is and… well, sees how it isn’t. Then comes home and plants a garden. No more best of all possible worlds. Just a garden and some peace.”

Bucky thought: _the best thing or the only thing_.

“Huh,” Morita said.

“Of course, I still plan on trying to make a _better_ world,” Jones added. “It’s just a book.”

“What kind of school were you thinking of?” asked Monty.

“Don’t know,” Bucky said, and Steve said, softly, “You used to say you wanted to build things.”

“Okay,” Bucky said, just bullshitting now, talking off the top of his head, spinning out a story like any other, “Engineering. Build bridges. We’ll need that. I don’t know, guess the world doesn’t need another Howard Stark, barely room for the one. But something.” He pondered it. He thought about his initials scratched into dog tags. His name, James Buchanan Barnes, written on the brass plaque in front of a dark, clean office. Thought, _Something that lasts._ Thought, _Did I want that?_

“Why not,” said Jones.

And they stood up, and they toasted again, and the words ‘after the war’ went into his throat and seared it, made his lungs tight, made him cough with the taste he hadn’t had for a long time. It was hope, and it hurt--hurt more than fear.

* * *

 Steve left dinner before he did and Bucky lingered, to remain in the safety of others’ company and who he pretended to be with them, the emptiness filling him up a little, in a backwards kind of way. But he couldn’t hold it up forever and he also couldn’t look at Morita too much. So he left before it got too late and walked back alone in the dark, hands shoved in his pockets and head down against a sudden stinging drizzle of sleet.

He found Steve sitting cross-legged on the floor, taking one last turn at a scuff on the boots he’d polished last night. His face relaxed around its own hard angles and stubborn bones. Calming himself with the task as he sometimes did, losing himself in fine detail.

“I'll do yours, too,” he said, when he heard Bucky, not looking up.

“Hey, thanks,” he said, bending to put a hand on his shoulder, lowering himself to sit next to him.

“Sure,” Steve said, subdued. Shifting under his touch, making room.

“You said we’d talk,” Bucky prompted. They sat beside each other, elbows braced identically on drawn-up knees. Same way they’d sat inside a pillow fort back home, years and years ago, just side by side while Bucky spun stories about what they were, what they might be, and Steve listened, and watched, and was safe.

“I did,” Steve said. “Will you be honest with me?”

“I…” Bucky didn’t contest the fact that he wasn’t, always.

But here was how it was. He told lies, and somehow Steve made them true.

Back home when Steve got sick and Bucky had no idea what to do, a helpless useless angry-at-himself angry-at-everyone feeling in the pit of his gut that wasn’t really anger that was really fear, he just said, ‘You’ll be all right,’ and somehow: Steve always was. He said, ‘We’ll take ‘em,’ and they had, so far. Nowadays it was ‘ _I’ll_ be all right,’ and maybe. Despite everything. He could be. Even before his strength was physical, Steve had been able to catapult them both over the gulf that yawned beyond Bucky’s bluff.

Because Bucky wasn’t sure of what he said or did and never had been, maybe because he’d never had to be; it was a game and all the rules had been in his favor, before. That was what he knew. How to play the game. But Steve took him so literally. He made it real, with the force of his will.

So the thing was, Bucky wasn’t even sure what honest meant.

He offered up one truth, an easy one. “All right, well. There wasn’t any WAC, the other night,” he said.

Steve didn’t look much reassured. “Look,” he said, “I know you’re not queer. Sometimes I think you're just doing it for me. Like I'm just taking--”

“Do we gotta,” Bucky started, and shook his head, and put his arm over Steve’s shoulders. “Maybe I am," paused swallowed. “Maybe I am queer. Maybe it’s just with you. Who the hell knows. Who cares. Maybe after the war I’ll grow my hair long and wear rouge like those buddies of yours, whaddya think. If you want.”

“It’s not what I want… come on, Bucky, you never wanted that before.”

“A lot’s different,” Bucky said, and that was true, at least. “Anyway. After the war. No one asked you at dinner, you notice that? You think you’re gonna go back to making Captain America movies?”

Steve opened his mouth like he wanted to dispute the change of topic, but just said,

“I guess no one will care about that anymore.”

“Oh, they will,” Bucky said. “They’re gonna want you for something. I don’t think you’re gonna get a garden, and you wouldn’t want one, would you. You even overwatered our damn spinach.”

“It _rained_ ,” Steve said, his voice choked.

If you’d looked up you would have known that would happen, Bucky thought. He said, "It doesn’t matter, does it,” rubbing at the back of Steve’s neck, rough around the bones of his spine. "Doesn’t much matter how queer I’m not. We’re making time.”

“I’m so selfish,” Steve said, and Bucky startled, almost wanted to laugh, tightened his grip on the back of his neck.

“I wish you fuckin’ were.” Trying to turn his head toward him, reaching his other hand to his cheek. “Come on. Come here.”

“I _am_.”

“So, you are. Show me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -"IIch ergebe mich" = "I surrender." Scene inspired by [stoatsandwich's tumblr post](http://stoatsandwich.tumblr.com/post/114334782536/your-cheerful-thought-for-today-captain-rogers).  
> -The explosive device is vaguely inspired by [a deleted scene in CA:TFA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AS0w0_EqVM)


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Note: Discussion of Captain America's involvement in D-Day is based on [this clip here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pov4qMSfg9w)

Making time.

No: _marking_ time. Just marking time. Marching in place, keeping up the rhythm without going anywhere. Trying, in fact, not to go anywhere.

The rhythm of the big machine. Sometimes, you could dance to it.

* * *

 They pushed back the tables in the mess and played V-disc records sent from home. They danced with the nurses and the WACs, and the thing Bucky tried to soak in even more than he tried to soak in clean water was the music. Some of the songs they played: _Sometimes I’m Happy,_ _That’s A’ Plenty_ , and _I’ve Got You Under My Skin_ , which at first made him smile because he’d serenaded Steve with that when they’d had bed bugs. Bucky had made up almost a whole new set of lyrics by the time Steve sorted it out for them.

Steve had known what to do. He had very carefully taken apart their bed frames. They had fallen over with a clatter and Bucky had helped him hold them up, but Steve told him not to, that he could do it on his own, you go out. Bucky had said, “Please, I’ll dance here.” Itchy from bug bites, and that was how he’d started it, singing to himself and dancing with part of the bed frame in hand, “I’ve got you, under my skin.” Ostensibly singing about the bugs. At the time, it had been just a joke.

_He sang it again to Steve that night._

_Slow and a little silly and a little sad._

_This time he lay on his back even though he could almost never bring himself to do that--to lie flat under something at all, let alone this. But told Steve, "Might as well." Steve said, "Kinda hurts though. I should get--" Bucky said, "But you." Steve said, "Well it’s different," and Bucky thought:_ nothing hurts anymore. _Said: "Try me." Steve said, "Is that right, is that good." Bucky said, "Maybe," said, "It’s not bad."_

_Later he said, "Thought I oughtta try, since we’ll have to--" Saying it himself because he didn't want to make Steve do that._

_Steve said, "I know, I know. Soon."_

_Bucky said, "But it’s all right though, I think I’m all right now. I don’t need… this. Do you."_

_Steve said, "I think. I think I need you to remind me I’m not just Captain America sometimes."_

_Bucky said, "Just you. Which is plenty." What he didn't say was that Steve did not exactly remind him of who_ he _was. Maybe who he wasn't. Maybe who he could be. He didn't say it because their lips were against each others, then, their eyes too close to see anything but blur, and he didn't_ want _to speak, or think. Marking time. Several beats of the relentless rhythm. Their foreheads touching, and the stickiness of Steve's palm on his chest._

_Finally he said, "Hell, I remind you all the time anyway. I'm a jerk."_

_Steve said, turning his head away, "God." Bucky said, "What about that," and Steve said, "I don’t know." Turning back._

* * *

 One night while music played, Bucky apologized to the proud nurse he’d bothered and gave her a smile that wasn’t so false and said, “I’ll be real respectful, want to dance?”

And she said, “Well, if you promise to be a gentleman.” Her name was Irene.

The idea of promising to be anything appealed to him. The idea of promise. He’d been told many times, by many people, that he had promise. The ones he got never seemed to keep.

Steve still didn’t dance. Over the years he had, in aggregate, given Bucky at least a hundred excuses about why he didn’t dance. Captain America danced, but only to sell war bonds.

More songs. _I’ve got rhythm, I’ve got music. I’ve got my girl--my man--who could ask for anything more._

Peggy came by and stood next to Steve, who shifted in surprise to see her, looking like to fold himself in half as a reflex. But Peggy said something and smiled, and then they walked back to stand against the wall. Steve put his hands in his pockets. When Bucky glanced back down at Irene, she said, "What're you thinking about, soldier?" He said, "Oh, everything. I mean, nothing. Both."

* * *

 It was early spring of ‘44 and from what they could hear, all of the Allies still seemed to be marking time, even as the brutality of the battles heightened. Operation Bodyguard was well underway and the Commandos would, they learned, be at the beaches in Normandy. In the meantime they had to take care of more than Hydra, were sent out to the south of France because they were small and mobile and could help the Resistance sabotage transport there. Dernier, Jones, and Morita were needed more and more, sorting misinformation to the Nazis. Picking up on fragments from the French Resistance. They lived and died by radio waves now.

And there was always talk about _diversions_. Codes. Misdirections. Lies, for the best cause: Garbo and Patton. Montgomery and Eisenhower.

There were whole false platoons out there, marking time. There were unmanned planes. Whole armies of nothing but toy soldiers.

* * *

 In France they helped Resistance fighters set up payloads for use on trains and trucks, breaking down the German infrastructure from within. Steve didn't wear the stars and stripes on his uniform, though he kept the reinforced cloth; they moved in the dark, in secrecy. Dernier's genius for bombs and ability to dismantle and repurpose German mines made them useful, and they all liked that. They heard the story from one group of fighters they met about how a bomb had gone off too soon and what had exploded was a whole shipment full of eggs, which had fallen right over into the river. The angry townspeople trying to scoop out the yolks for omelets.

"See?" Dernier told them, with a mixture of fervor and delight. " _On ne saurait faire d'omelet--_ I told you so!"

"I think those eggs got a little too broke," Bucky said.

" _Pas pour les Français,_ " Dernier said. Not for the French.

"Here's hoping you're right about that."

* * *

 Morita listened to the radio all the time now, while April turned to May, even stopping to set up an antenna when they paused on the march. Even listening late at night, when they had made camp. One night they had joined a group of ragtag Frenchmen and got to stay in their house, where two families lived on top of each other. Close quarters, the Commandos all together in a the warm kitchen, near the fire. Bucky couldn’t sleep, so he went outside, where he found Morita in the lean-to where they stacked wood, on the radio.

“Sarge,” Morita said, when he saw him. Morita had chewing gum in his mouth like always, had to be a pretty old piece by now. He worried it over like a long-held grievance. His voice came out too loud, so he shook his head, took off his headset. “Know what I’m listening to?”

Bucky could hear it, actually, the pluck and swoop of faraway jazz, the the way the melody slid and lilted, bubbling like a river, with peaks and slow calm pools. The kind of music that could carry him away, back home. Music. He missed it--always. He missed it, still.

“That’s Jerry,” Morita said, shrugging. "Singing about our empires falling down. Kind of funny, huh?” He shut his teeth, a clink of bone on bone.

“I don’t much like it,” Bucky said. Nazi propaganda music was a bad joke, everyone knew, a stupid mix of American jazz and German jingoism.

“Yeah, I don’t either.” Morita leaned forward, twisted the radio dial so the music garbled. Static screeched and the sound dwindled to nothing. “Specially those parts about Captain America. Playing the whole star-spangled man song and everything, saying ‘what plan.’ And some crap about the Jews and Roosevelt, like always.”

“It’s just bullshit,” Bucky said.

“How the Allies are so strapped for soldiers they’ll take a vaudeville nance.”

Bucky hissed, under his breath, between his teeth.

“Those Germans.” Morita sounded merely thoughtful. “They got the tune right, but not the words, huh?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, maybe a little dangerous, “Not the words.”

“We know better,” Morita said.

“We _fuckin'_ do,” Bucky said. He thought about all those comics about the Japs. Steve had written harsh letters to the publishers when he saw those, but still. He thought of all the ways Morita knew that the truth wasn’t the truth and lies weren’t lies and it was all--nowadays--a little bit of both.

So they were square, after all, though Bucky wasn’t sure how much Morita really knew.

He and Steve barely even touched each other now they were out in the field. They had both realized that they’d stepped too far over the edge, of course. Once they’d called the thing by name there it had gone. Not all at once but bit by bit, realizing in the dark, together, a slow winding-down over the course of their stay at base. Once they’d gotten back to being able to talk almost like they had at home, maybe.

Or maybe how it went was, like the bargain in a fable, you had to trade one thing for another thing and never got both at once.

Maybe it was like that poem Mr. Higgins had once read to them about the Great War. Maudlin stuff. About a soldier who lost his legs? Or was it his sight. But no regrets because he served his country. A sort of trade, then. A cold comfort. It made sense in a poem the way things made sense in dreams, or at night, or in the dark inside of your head where you bargained silent midnight pleas. It made sense in the dark. But not once you dragged it out into daylight. So he never did.

They marked time.

* * *

 Radio set up in a barn near the French border, Morita tuned them in to the German broadcast that announced Captain America was dead.

Shot dead at Monte Cassino. That sounded like a place you gambled in Atlantic City. He’d known there were decoys, false units sent out to confuse the Germans. You could put the Captain America uniform on anyone, after all. He still found it jarring, the triumphant German-accented voice that proclaimed the fall of the Allies’ great hero, _a vaudeville act put on by the Hollywood Jews that has met its final curtain_.

“Hear that, Cap?” said Dum Dum, who pressed on the bright side of things the way he pressed his hat to his head in high wind. “We’ll catch ‘em by surprise for sure.”

“Lucky I’ve already had my Last Rites three times,” Steve said, bemused and then, when it struck him, horrified. Bucky watched it, the slow collapse of his face from stolidity. “I’m not dead… someone else is, though. Someone else who was just as much Captain America, I think.”

“Or it could be a lie out of whole cloth,” Jones said uncertainly.

“ _Non_ ,” Dernier opined.

Bucky’s hand spasmed, and he had to make a hard tight fist, nails digging into the lines of his palm.

“Why don’t Sarge and the Captain take first watch tonight,” Morita said. He looked studiedly at the ground.

“Like a wake,” Bucky said, relief bubbling in his throat, trying not to look at Steve, trying not to breathe, even.

“That’s in poor taste,” Monty said.

“Christ,” Bucky said. “What isn’t anymore.”

They didn’t touch each other.

Maybe touching meant less than it had before, maybe that was it.

Like a new record played over and over until you only heard the sour notes, the words that sounded like bad jokes.

They didn’t say anything for a long time, either.

They sat outside with their backs to a broken fence and looked out into the darkness, the unsown fields. Crickets cricking. There was a wild smell of newness in the air, the scent of growing things and mud, a burgeoning like birth, like blood.

“If you decide you’re gonna ask again to go in the first wave,” Bucky started, talking about Operation Overlord. Steve had volunteered at first to be in the earliest wave on the beaches, and Carter and Phillips had, thank God, talked him down. Phillips had said, Christ Almighty, son, do you have a death wish? Don’t forget you have government property in there. And Bucky had thought Steve would blow his top. The old Steve might have. Captain America had just very carefully let out his breath.

“No,” Steve said now, holding the words in his mouth one at a time. Speaking lines by rote, though Bucky supposed he did believe them. “I should never have brought it up; I know, tactically, what’s important, I know our role there. We’ve been over it. Men have had years of training. And, of course, I couldn’t ask you and the Commandos to take that risk.”

“So what we’re there for’s a sac bunt and let someone else steal home.” That was the way they’d played ball as kids. Steve was not naturally inclined to bunt. But he knew the game was bigger than him even if he was the type to swing for fences. So if it let them win, he’d do it. He’d take a sacrifice bunt and let Bucky run like hell for home.

“It ain’t baseball,” Steve sounded more sarcastic than Bucky had heard him for awhile.

“For a lot of them it will be,” Bucky said, thinking of his first fight. A lot of the troops at Normandy would be fresh, they’d heard, never have seen battle. Kids. “They won’t know any better. _We_ still don’t know any better.” That was charitable of him, he’d almost said _you_ don’t know any better. But it was true. For all the time the Commandos had spent in the field they hadn’t fought large-scale, not like this was going to be. Steve hadn’t anyhow. For his part, Bucky tried not to imagine another, even worse Azzano.

“A lot of men are going to die,” said Steve.

“That’s the plan. They’re gonna die whether or not you’re there,” Bucky said. _You had to keep your eye on the tiny white ball and remember why it was so important. So damn important._ “Planting the flag, keep everyone moving forward. You’re good at that, you know?”

Steve sighed, rubbing his hands slowly over his knees. In his smaller person his vexatious fidgeting had looked less like a threat. “I’m used to long odds,” he said. “I don’t like it when it’s other people’s lives. I know what’s needed, but I don’t like how it is.”

Captain America, shot dead at Monte Cassino. Captain America, dead at Normandy, Bucky thought, and his stomach clenched. “Hell. I’m glad it wasn’t you,” Bucky said. “What scares me is you’re not.”

"That's awful. I couldn't be."

That was the thing, now he thought of it, that always baffled him about Steve. He was not in any fundamental way afraid. Angry, yes, always angry about _some_ thing or other. A clean-burning rage. It had reason behind it. He always had reasons, whose intensity made up for their occasional inconsistency. But he wasn’t afraid, even when he ought to have reasons for that, too.

Bucky had grown up with little to be afraid of and a kernel of fear inside him anyway. His fear had no reason, no rhyme. It had a relentless rhythm like the beat of his heart. That, he thought, was the difference. That was what they had done to him. Blown fear up bigger and it came out not as strength like Steve’s, but as the ability merely to survive.

He’d gotten hit with shrapnel three times now and it had healed in a day and a half each time. He’d never let Steve see. A knife wound that had gone away so fast he didn’t even mention it. Not _my_ blood. Not me. If he had told them just after the rescue, maybe it would have been declared useful, maybe they’d have given him his own costume. Most likely not. Not much of use in surviving with nothing else inside.

“I am,” Bucky said, and leaned forward to brush Steve's shoulder with his own. “I’m _glad_ it wasn’t you.”

The tune was right. The words were wrong. That wasn't what he wanted to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -The egg story is true.  
> -The music Morita's listening to is [Charlie and His Orchestra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_and_his_Orchestra), a real [Nazi propaganda band](https://archive.org/details/AFRS-V-Disc-6a).  
> -If you're curious about Morita and his radio, I have written [a separate fic about him](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4223013).


	10. Chapter 10

They crossed to Dover in a captured Hydra submarine: The Leviathan. They sat in the belly of the whale. Agent Carter had infiltrated the construction crew and turned half of the workers--French, some captured Russians--against their Hydra guards. Captain America and his squad had come in to finish the job. The submarine had been complete, and now stood ready for Allied use. They’d done well.

Under water, he felt less turbulence than he had imagined; could barely feel motion at all. There were no windows on the Leviathan so he had to picture for himself what was outside. Dark, dark blue. The glub of bubbles. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (they weren’t really; the English Channel wasn’t nearly so deep). The funny part was how the air inside smelled nothing like the ocean. Just the tang, very faint, of cleaning fluid they had used after the fight. He’d thought there would be windows.

Morita explained the radar system to him, noting with mild pleasure that, “The Germans got nothing on the Allies for radar, this Hohentwiel setup’s junk.” Which did not, frankly, make Bucky feel any safer. Agent Carter worked the controls: who knew she could pilot a submarine? Meanwhile, she spoke quietly to Jones, who flipped through one of the new code books they had discovered onboard.

“Wonder if anyone told Hydra that putting a big picture of a giant squid on their sub’s asking for trouble,” Bucky said, standing back, watching the glittering knobs and colored lights of the submarine control.

“Luckily,” Steve said to Bucky, who had sometimes taken that role when they played around as kids, “we’ve got Captain Nemo.”

“And Jolly Rogers,” Bucky said. Steve wasn’t officially Captain America now. They hoped to lull Hydra into the belief that they had killed him, to draw them out in France, where the Commandos would be needed to track down the Hydra tech they knew how best to deal with. So, Steve was wearing his Army captain’s field uniform, that was all. None of the armor. Bucky worried.

“Still say it looks more like an octopus,” Dum Dum said.

* * *

 They surfaced with a great rush of water and a sense of sudden lightness, like a popped and bobbing cork. Agent Carter looked through the periscope. The rest of them looked at Agent Carter. She opened the hatch for Jones and Morita to clamber up and run out the antenna of their radio, careful to keep the thing out of the water, to make contact with command onshore.

They docked and Bucky blinked at the sight of the white chalky cliffs touched by white chalky clouds, which trailed in streaks across the sky. Looking out over the water, he saw construction crews in the bay, building something that Peggy told them were Mulberry Harbours. “Albion,” Monty said, looking up, doffing his beret and holding it to his chest.

Here, the Howling Commandos became just another group of soldiers siphoned through the trains and trucks to London and then over a narrow bridge to Portsmouth.

* * *

 Steve wasn’t Captain America in England. They became two of many, men whom Bucky could tell had trained long and hard together, tightly conditioned and, in these quarters, tightly packed. The had to jostle their way through a long winding line to get their lunch at the Portsmouth camp.

“This is Steve,” Bucky said, introducing him when they settled their trays at the end of a crowded table, “and I’m James. Steve here used to animate for the Popeye cartoons, isn’t that right, Steve?” To be fair, Steve had fabricated that particular story--at least, a story about working as an animator--to cover up his recruitment as Captain America, in the letters he’d sent to Bucky. Lucky he’d always worn a mask in the pictures, though it was a miracle more soldiers didn’t recognize him from newsreels. They didn’t seem to. Maybe they didn’t expect to. Maybe they were all used to keeping secrets by now.

“James,” Steve said, sounding struck. Then he said, “It’s true, I made quite a name for myself out in Hollywood. Before I came along, Popeye had two eyes.”

Bucky laughed. “Before you came along,” he said, “he hadn’t even met a can a’ spinach. He was just a scrawny little good for nothin.’”

Steve shook his head at him, mouthing, _jerk_. Bucky raised his eyebrows back.

“You’re shittin’ me.” The other American sergeant, sitting across from them, had an accent that sounded like home. A look about him, too, the kind of sardonic twist to his smile. He was an older man, with wispy dark hair and wrinkles cut into his forehead. “I’m Irv, by the way.”

“Hey there.” Bucky raised his tin mug of water in salute. Steve nodded. The group of soldiers to their left was already in mid-conversation, so the three of them, Steve, Bucky, and their new acquaintance, all set to examining their lunch.

Bucky peeled apart the sandwich he’d been given and frowned at it. A little blob of jam and a piece of meat he didn’t recognize. He let the food fall back to his plate. He was hungry, but then, he always felt hungry. Steve glanced over at him, so Bucky picked the thing up and took a bite.

“You from back East?” Bucky said to Irv, mouth full, largely to distract himself from the taste. He commenced the stolid, fervent chewing needed to stoke the empty engine inside

“Sure am. Queens, New _Yawk_ , moved the family up to Forest Hills a couple years back. Nothing so exciting as Popeye. I sell furs.”

“We’re from,” Steve said, and they looked at each other, and Steve said “Br--” and Bucky said, loudly, “Paramus.”

“Oh, yeah,” Steve said, “ _Joisey._ ”

“Ain’t that something.” Irv nodded at Bucky. “And what’s your story?”

“He’s too modest to admit it,” Steve cut in, “But he’s a track athlete. Olympic alternate team in ‘36. Hammer throw and the triple jump. You wouldn’t think those two go together, but you ought to see him. He winds up, takes three hops and lets go and that thing flies like you would not believe. Jesse Owens got so distracted watching he almost missed final call for the hundred yard dash. And this guy, believe it or not, he stood right there making faces at Hitler the whole time Owens spent warming up.”

Bucky had taken a large bite of his sandwich. Which now proved to have been a bad idea. He coughed, loudly.

“And,” Steve went on earnestly, resting his elbows on the table, “While they were over there, he’d conduct the entire 440 relay team in a jazz rendition of the National Anthem during cooldowns.”

Bucky had lifted his mug to his mouth when Steve went on:

“ _In German_.”

He almost sprayed water across the table.

Irv’s mouth hung open. He blinked, maybe taken in by some of Steve’s square-jawed sincerity. “Lemme guess,” he said finally. “The only part of that story that’s true is you’re from Paramus.”

Steve had to duck his head.

“Not even that,” Bucky said, once he had adequately recovered. “Brooklyn.”

Irv nodded, taking it in stride. “All righty,” he said. “You Dodgers fans, then?”

“Oh,” Bucky said.

Steve said, “Well, _yeah_ ,” in his you-wanna-make-something-of-it tone, but joking.

“Well, you guys seem like you appreciate a good story, and this one’s true,” Irv said, while Bucky wiped his lips with the back of his hand, contemplating the lumpy, fraying Brussels sprouts that took up the rest of his tray. “Buddy of mine’s got a baseball signed by Di Maggio, and he wrote on it, To hell with you, Hitler, and when we fly out he’s gonna drop it right out of the plane on top of the Krauts. Figured you’d appreciate that. Even being Dodgers fans.”

“Ha,” Bucky said, looking sideways at Steve, who swallowed, all of a sudden.

“Di Maggio’s okay,” Steve said, at last.

“That’s it. Hell with you, Hitler,” Bucky said.

“Cheers to that,” said Irv.

“You know, I think they screwed us for being late to lunch,” Bucky said, as they turned in their mostly-empty plates. “Swear I saw some of the Brits eating sausage. Life’s not fair.”

* * *

 They met kids as excited as Boy Scouts about some of the things they got issued for the invasion: gizmos like tiny files to sew into your shirt in case of capture, or silk scarves with secret maps of France. French francs printed at the behest of the United States, which made Bucky think about war bonds.

One kid, who looked to be barely out of high school, showed Steve a tiny magnetic button. Just like a pants button, for use as a compass in case of emergency. He gave one to Steve and one to Bucky, who put it in his pocket.

“Neat, right?” the kid said to Steve. “Sir.”

Dressed as an ordinary soldier, Steve still stood out. He drew attention. Once, he’d stood out because he was small and a little crooked. (That was part of what Bucky had liked about him. He had an affection for slight mistakes. Like pressing on the tender part of a bruise.) Nowadays he stood out because he was beautiful. Yeah, Bucky thought. Not like a woman though. The thought nagged at him. Maybe beautiful was wrong. Maybe it was like a thing Steve told him once about he learned in art class, when things weren’t beautiful exactly, no, okay, not beautiful, but awe-inspiring, tremendous, scary even. When you couldn’t stop looking at them. Sublime was the word. Sublime like deep crevasses and deep oceans and the black beneath deep blue. The color Steve used to see red as, before, which he had described as just dark, just the same as the night sky. The color of blood at night to someone who had never seen red.

The fucked up thing was the compass buttons didn’t even work. The things they’d issued these kids were just shit. Bucky balanced his on the head of a pin and brought it close so he could see and it just spun and spun and then fixed itself pointing toward his left breast pocket. Which was not north.

Steve said his worked fine.

“Trust me to get the one that’s _verrückt_ ,” Bucky said. He stopped, put one hand to his mouth.

Steve stared at him.

“What’s that even mean,” Bucky said. “Fuck, fuck the Germans.”

“Crazy,” Steve said, “I thought it meant crazy, not broken.”

“I know,” Bucky said. “ _I know._ Figures, they’d give me that one. I mean that’s almost the same thing.”

“Bucky, are you--”

“I swear to God Steve. If you ask me one more time if I’m okay.”

“You’ll what,” said Steve.

“I don’t know,” Bucky said, quietly. “Maybe I’ll ask _you_.”

They were issued new weapons. Everyone had been and most had tested them before they got there. Bucky stuck to his modified M1941, Howard Stark’s design, and Jones to his big Thompson. Bucky helped Steve with his rifle out on the range, muttering over it, helping him get his aim right.

The Man with the Plan. Steve showed ferocity that surprised some of the Commandos in his request that they all get anti-gas uniforms, which were made of a harsh, stiff cloth that smelled awful.

“You got one too, right?” Bucky said.

“I don’t need--”

“ _Steve_.”

“You just wanna make the rest of us look like bozos,” Dum Dum grumbled.

“That hat does it for you,” Monty said.

“You’re one to talk,” pointed out Jones.

“I’m not complaining,” Morita said, exchanging a look with Bucky. “Take anything I can get.”

Bucky wrinkled his nose but folded up the clothes grimly and stowed them away. Several days to go, yet. They hadn’t been told how many; they hadn’t been told much.

* * *

 He recalled now how this felt, far back at the beginning of the war, for him, the quiet before the battle. The wait. Halfway unbelieving, even then, what was really gonna happen. Seemed impossible, like imagination, like how jumping into cold water always proved a surprise.

He remembered looking around the Italian countryside, the spirals of dark green cypress and the sky so pale a blue he felt he could float up into it. Like the Italy in paintings at the World’s Fair--the chief thing there Steve had wanted to see. The World’s Fair, where Bucky’d gone so many times after he helped build the railroad there in ‘39… and in ‘40, helped to tear it down.

Da Vinci. _Sfumato_ , the mist in the distance that obscured your vision if you tried to see far away; the smoke in the distance, not so far as all that. He remembered making up stories to describe to his mother and sisters and Steve in letters home. Remembered before the fighting started, feeling like he might as well just be taking a walk in the park, and then--

He hadn’t wanted to pull the trigger. In training Bucky had gotten so much praise for his steady hands, the slight, perfect pause before he took the shot, that no one seemed to realize it was only because he didn’t want to take the shot at all. Sometimes. Back when Bucky had been crouched at the starting line of a race waiting nerveless for the gun, or hefting the bat in his hand as the pitcher wound up. Or listening to the silence before the roar of incoming bombers. The thing was. Sometimes. He had wanted to just fold up and say fuck it. What’s the point.

I give up.

Bucky had never told anyone, but the first time he’d come across an Italian soldier, among the scrubby trees perched on terraces in the hilly outskirts of a villa, he had frozen. The soldier had been foraging. Had his hat full of tiny, barely-ripe plums. Bucky had been out running a message to another troop. Barnes the Track Star, quicker to cover ground than any in his unit. So. They’d seen each other, and stood there. And then slowly backed away, and turned. It might never have happened. He’d had a finger on the trigger of his gun the whole time. It had cramped up like that.

He couldn’t bring himself to shoot until he saw Donovan take a spray of shrapnel right next to him and then somehow it was easy. Almost like the enemy who’d shot down his buddy had shown him how. Here’s how you do it. Here’s what a man looks like scrabbling at a messy hole in the side of his chest, jerking and seizing on the ground. That’s how it is. That’s how it’s done.

He saw again and again how very much a man could lose and still not believe it. Saw how _fear_ made people meaner and more desperate than rage, saw dying men grabbing at living. Saw how terror was the last thing left when your life bled out around you. Sometimes loud and sometimes quiet terror, that ebbed, so slow, to nothing. The very flow of blood was fear. That pause before the rush of his blood and the release of his breath, when he had the chance to shoot and knew he had to, _us or them_. _Him or me. Me_. He chose the deep inner drive of himself and he always knew, always, that he was a coin’s flip away from being at the other end of the scope.

It got _easy_ to shoot. It got so easy that now he hardly remembered what the hell he’d been thinking, that first time. It had long since stopped feeling like a choice. A lottery, a number. The flip of a coin in a weighted game. The goddamn Black Sox his dad talked about. Buck _Weaver_. Had he cheated? Had he not?

_Ich ergebe mich._

Bucky didn’t know what he ought to feel guilty for, any longer, and what he oughtn’t. The many shots he had since taken, or the one he hadn’t. So he kept his head down mostly, at Portsmouth, and didn’t make friends.

Steve went to Confession with the other Catholic soldiers. And he got driven out in a van to meet with Command. He talked to Someone Important about something which he couldn’t even mention to Bucky, top secret, a secret he held inside like sickness: it made him pale. The vein at the side of his jaw flickered.

* * *

 The Red Cross clubs were open and some of the Commandos even went at night. Jones went out with Agent Carter, no less, but not to those clubs. The Red Cross did have nights open to negroes only but not both. Apparently they had been operating in an integrated fashion awhile, this being Great Britain and not America, but the American GIs had started fights. So Agent Carter told Jones about somewhere else. “It’s a brave new world in Britain,” she said, and Jones had laughed. Steve had stood very still. Bucky figured Jones and Carter were probably out on official business, too, all those codes. Like the fondue Steve had told him about, just an excuse. Fondue, Bucky had said when he’d heard, rather enjoying Howard Stark’s witticism for once.

* * *

 Bucky didn’t feel like dancing anymore, so he didn’t go to the Red Cross clubs. The jazz that played in his head was the kind he’d heard on Morita’s radio, a sound that mocked him in dreams, a German-accented rendition of words he had heard before.

_Sehr gut. Sehr stark. Not quite good enough. Doubt and fear. Under my skin. I got you. Until you aren’t afraid of the pain. Coward, what do you expect._

_What do you expect?_

He woke up one night because he always slept lightly and found the sound he’d heard was Steve’s feet hitting the floor. Two bunks away, Dum Dum snorted loudly. Monty, Morita, and Jones were still out somewhere.

“What is it?” Bucky hissed.

Steve turned, looking guilty, looking caught, and shook his head.

Bucky sighed and lay back. He waited for the count of several Mississippis. Then he got up and followed Steve outside. He got there in time to see him take off at a dead sprint down the path outside. Running. There was no way Bucky could keep up; he couldn’t even try. He took several halting, helpless steps after him and let him vanish, running out from grass and over the humps of sand dunes they’d had to charge up and down already earlier that day. They weren’t natural formations; they’d been built up, for practice. Steve ran between them, over them, and out onto short grass, and then Bucky couldn’t see him anymore.

Out past the Channel, past the docks and the camps of soldiers ready to move out. The docks so jammed with black hulls of boats he couldn’t even see the water.

He stood there for a very long time, the back of his neck itchy in the darkness. Hours passed, it had to be hours, and he walked out over the border of grass and into the thin-packed dunes. He trudged up top of one, bare feet slipping, unable to find purchase. The sand cold on his feet and loose, sliding away like the sifting stuff in the bottom bulb of an hourglass. Christ, where had Steve gone? He could get shot; there might be bombers, the Allies might shoot him for running like that at night, like a crazy person. The wind had whipped up and Bucky kept starting, turning around, at the ghost of voices he couldn’t quite hear.

He heard Steve almost before he saw him, the rasp of breath. In outline his shoulders had begun to slump, the quick cadence of his legs slowed, and Bucky recognized a runner’s true exhaustion. He recalled the feeling. When you had come to the end of the invisible rope that formerly had pulled you along, the thin line of your own will and sinew. And then, when that final fatigue hit, you grasped for the rope that had pulled you forward and found nothing but slack. So instead you faltered, flailing for the tail end of it, and failing, falling short.

“Steve,” he said, loud enough just to carry, waving one hand in the air like a signalman. Steve raised his head and his eyes were dark pits in the distance; he stumbled up the incline toward Bucky and his feet sunk and he went down on his knees, in the sand. His shirt dark with sweat, stuck to the middle of his chest, and Bucky smelled an ammoniac, iron tang coming off him.

“God,” sliding down to him, one leg out, one hand out, “What’d you do, what the hell--”

“Maybe--I’m--the--track star--” Steve said. “Did a marathon or--two--”

The first guy to run a marathon had fucking died. Bucky’s old track coach Mr. Higgins had informed him of this fact as he had informed him of many others, with detached appreciation for the feat. To give all of oneself. He had often spoken of that. Of that, and the War to End All Wars, as if by the sweat of his own brow he had ended them himself, or as if, as if--

“I said I was gonna ask,” Bucky said, putting one hand to Steve’s forehead. It slipped off, and what terrified him was that the skin was cool, but still sweaty, and he said, “are you--” His hand moved to Steve’s wrist, feeling for his pulse, which was rapid and hard and strong.

“Just wanted to see if I could get tired, if I could--”

“It’s enough, you’ve done enough,” Bucky said, “I don’t want to hear any more about the serum.”

“I don’t either,” Steve said thickly, pulling his hand away, burying his fist in the sand. Deep. “Government _property_.” He looked up, kneeling, just below Bucky.

“Well, then, take better care of it.,” Bucky said, drawing up his knees, moving down closer, “Jesus. Come on, we gotta get you cleaned up, you need _water_...”

“You’re right sometimes,” Steve said, not talking about his offer of a drink.

“God forbid,” Bucky said. “God forbid you listen to me.”

“I do,” Steve said, “More than you think.”

* * *

Four days later. D-Day. Just dawn. In the wake of rain and wind, a gray sfumato plumed with sudden brilliance, bursts of color far across the Channel, just barely visible through the clouds. The pale blooms of light could have been beautiful, Bucky thought, but they were not. They could have been something Steve might draw, had he ever gotten practice drawing in colors. Let alone colors so delicate and muted and far away. All the colors, and somewhere out there, among the spray of tracers and flares and gunfire, a little white ball.

An awestruck silence descended on all of them like the whistle of a distant bomb. Once heard it left behind a sense of the inevitability of its fall. The noise’s memory might ring forever in your ears.

Not beautiful, no. Sublime. A glory deeply creased with something dark. The color of blood to someone who had never seen red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Heartfelt and profound thanks to [stripyjamjar](http://archiveofourown.org/users/stripyjamjar/pseuds/stripyjamjar) for her meticulous beta, encouragement, and much of Steve’s Bucky-as-Olympic-athlete snark.  
> -All D-Day gizmos are real. The baseball story is true.  
> -[Buck Weaver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Weaver)  
> -The character Irv is dedicated to my grandfather, who passed away last week (his name was Irwin. His father called him Irving. He’d say ‘Dad. My name is Irwin.’ ‘I know that, Irving!’ said his dad). He had a wonderful deadpan sense of humor and an uncanny sense of direction, and he is sorely missed.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for sex in this chapter.

Steve Rogers had run himself into the ground back in Britain. A week later, on D-Day + 3, Captain America jogged lightly yet determinedly off their landing craft onto a cleared-out strip of Omaha Beach. With gimlet eye and grim-set jaw, and the bright round of his shield shining on his arm.

“Cut!” the cameraman said.

Steve let out a long, hissing sigh.

* * *

 They made the crossing at night, along with boats bringing supplies and medical support to the troops on the beach. Loading up, for most around them, had the balletic cadence of long practice. They pushed off into the water with the camera crew following Steve. Despite the troubling news they’d heard back from the landing site, the cameraman instructed them that they ought to act in a cheerful manner, so as to raise morale. Not too cheerful but talk amongst yourselves, like that.

Dernier somewhat took the wind out of all their sails by throwing up noisily over the railing. Seasick already. Jones handed him a tablet, but Dernier waved it off. “ _Allons-y_ ,” he said, wiping his mouth. He looked drawn. He had spent many hours with not only the Commandos but also the troops set to land, teaching them protocol for disarming Hydra-technology bombs and mines.

Morita, out of sight of the cameras himself, offered Bucky a large handful of wrapped-up condoms. Condoms had been handed out plentifully as confetti in the run-up to the invasion, apparently to avoid any last-minute strikes of VD. Some soldiers put them to more inventive use. Morita had stuffed one full of his store of hoarded gum and tied it off at the top.

“The hell, Jim,” Bucky said, taking the handful by reflex. He almost dropped one.

“For your rifle,” Morita said. He rolled one down over the top of his own gun; his pistol, too. “Best shooter we got, better keep it safe.” Maybe the way it was, now, was that both he and Morita found the film crew more objectionable than the idea of Sergeant Barnes and Captain America fucking with U.S. Army condoms.

“Barnes needs lots,” Dum Dum muttered. “Sure he does, best shooter around, eh.” Bucky felt somewhat abashed, recalling all the stories he’d told in his old unit. To be fair, some had been true. All had been fairly blue.

“Yeah, and Howard Stark didn’t design this thing just for me to get it wet,” Bucky said, swinging the rifle around and rubbing a thumb over the barrel. To make the gesture even more obscene, he’d already smeared his rifle with Cosmoline to keep it free of rust. His thumb came away with a dark smudge, and Bucky wiped it off on the skin of the back of his hand. Steve, on camera, began turning slowly beet red.

“What’s that part in the USO show?” Bucky added mercilessly. “Bullet in your--”

“--A bullet in your best guy’s gun,” Steve said, catching his eye. Bucky was afraid he’d be angry, but he didn’t seem to be. He was biting at his lip. Bucky tossed him a condom packet, too, and Steve caught it deftly in one hand. The cameraman, though, said, “No.” So Steve tucked it away in a pocket.

“Are we to have a rousing rendition of that,” Monty said, sarcastic. “The Star-Spangled Man.”

“Can’t be the same without showgirls,” Jones said.

Dum Dum had his hat tipped forward over his eyes and his head tilted back. He had the knack of dozing off anywhere, a knack Bucky always envied. “Wake me up when we run into some of those.”

“Hm,” Jones said, thinking it over, “we had an all-male kickline at our college revue. And we’ve got these Mae Wests.” Bouncing the prominent chest of his inflatable life vest in his hands. “Be pretty convincing, I’d say.” Even Steve, sitting on the side of the boat, smiled at that. Steve, of course, had to be on his best behavior. It made Bucky feel like he had to take on some of the old belligerence himself.

Dernier muttered something in French and spit over the side one more time, then turned back. Jones laughed. “ _Ouai, en effet_ ,” he said, tugging at a strap.

“You want to join in on the kickline?” Bucky asked the cameraman, but his eyes were on Steve, whom he could just see seething beneath the patient Captain America smile. “Or will those flat feet trip you up?”

He shouldn’t have said that. Back home, _Steve_ would’ve been the one to say that but then again back home Steve wouldn’t have been in this situation in the first place.

The smear on the back of his hand reminded him of the stickiness of Brylcreem in the heat. He took care of his gun now the way he’d used to take care of his hair. The whole outing, even starting at night, reminded him of the excitement ramping up to a date, a day at the beach on Coney Island. Getting dressed, careful, collar stiff even though you knew you might want to go wading later, even though you knew something’d happen to mess it up. Not caring.

Even the ropes at the landing site, when they finally made it to France, made him think of the ropes anchored onto poles at the shore so little kids could venture out into the sea without fear of drowning. Seagulls squawking the whole time and the smell of hot dogs in the heat.

* * *

 After they’d disembarked several times for the film crew, Morita lost patience with the way the cameraman kept edging him out of the shot.

“Forget this,” he announced, stepping back into their landing craft and grabbing his med kit. “I’m gonna go help out. Permission, Captain?” He saluted, abrupt but correct. Steve nodded.

And he turned, squinting out over the beach. The debris, the rolling cans in the sand. The fluttering pages of someone’s rolled-up newspaper or comic book. Maybe it was an issue of Captain America. Big dark rivulets down the beach where liquids of all kinds had run. The smell was one he didn’t want to think about. Worse in this heat. Birds circled, shrieking.

Knocked-over wooden crosses and barbed wire stood in the distance, the remains of the German defensive line. They looked like X’s and O’s scattered all around now, big loops of wire and the tumbledown jacks of wood where mines had been set. Hung on the wire just in view, someone’s jacket; it wasn’t empty. Ragged flesh flapped out of one sleeve. All a jumble. Bucky watched Steve looking at it because he couldn’t look at it through his own eyes all the way, had to think more about what Steve might see, the way he often did. Bucky still had to stop himself thinking: how would I describe this to him back home to make it seem all right?

Red Cross crews had set up stations along the beach and Morita marched off toward one of those, hefting his medical kit and kicking an empty helmet on his way. It bumped through the sand and rocked to a halt.

“We finished?” Steve said, turning to the camera crew. His voice firm but, to Bucky’s ear, surreally mild. “Because I’m done here, too. My ma was a nurse, you know. She spent her _life_ helping people.” Spent it, that’s right, Bucky thought, remembering Mrs. Rogers. What had his parents said about her? _She had her pride._ The stupid meaninglessness of that made him want to spit. “I’m going to see what I can do, help the Corporal out. Maybe you can get that in your shot.”

“The _president_ ,” said the cameraman. “Roosevelt himself has commissioned this film to raise money for war bonds.”

“ _Tant pis,_ ” said Dernier. Bucky knew that one: _tough shit._

“Well, to quote Prime Minister Winston _Churchill_ himself,” Bucky said, “we won’t let this garbage get in our way. That’s what he said, ain’t it?”

“Not verbatim,” Monty said.

Jones neglected to translate Dernier’s aside, but said, “I think we’ve got enough footage for a newsreel, right?”

“Of _you_ , maybe,” the cameraman grumped.

Dernier unleashed a spitfire string of French profanity. Steve just held up one hand. “Enough,” he said, and the cameraman and Dernier both shut up.

* * *

 It was when Morita stood up from one wounded man and waved a hand at Steve that things started to get even stranger. “Guy says he knows you, Captain,” he called.

“Captain America saved my life back in Italy,” the soldier said. “Another beach campaign. He said we were a part of something bigger and by God I had to hold up my end or it’d move on without me and so I did,” he said. “He said that--is that him?”

Steve turned, and Bucky saw his face. Could not put a name to the expression on it. Sorrow. Or awe. Or _pride_. Bucky’s throat ached, because it hadn’t been Steve, of course, it had been the other one.

And then, with Captain America silhouetted red-white-blue and glinting silver against the sand in the suddenly blinding sun, he heard the roar of gunfire.

Steve had heard it first. He threw up his shield and even the 7.5mm rounds fired from the machine gun turret bounced off the vibranium like BB pellets. Steve lunged forward--he wasn’t in the middle of the Red Cross encampment, thank God, he was still off to one side trying to talk to the cameraman--and _tackled_ the man. He covered them both while bullets rang against his shield.

Bucky’s head whipped to follow the line of fire and he saw it. The concrete tower around a machine gun turret on a nearby steep short cliff. A squat gray block, its overhang a lowering Boris Karlov eyebrow and the gun muzzle pointing at them from beneath, swiveling. A thousand yards, at least, away. The slit just wide enough--and Bucky flung himself forward into a dead run. His feet sought purchase on the sand but he’d run on sand before, and he covered the distance in less than two-and-a-half minutes, impelled by desperation. Glanced back to see Steve crouching over the _fucking cameraman_ with shield up even while automatic fire whipped through the beach one more time. Medics scrambling to drag wounded men out of the way, shouting orders that faded out behind him while he ran.

Bucky scrabbled and vaulted his way up the cliff face and there was a German keeping guard; Bucky saw him, grabbed his pistol, shot through the goddamn condom he had forgotten to take off and didn’t even have to stop to see the man fall. On his belt he had two grenades. Two strikes and you’re out. Well all right, just slightly worse odds than fucking baseball. He grabbed one, pulled the pin, counted one, two-- and running up close enough to the turret that he imagined he heard voices inside, he lobbed it into the slit.

It went off. He heard it, muffled somewhat by concrete. The machine gun muzzle still swiveled, but empty, aimless as a dead eye rolling in its socket.

A moment of quiet. The rapid machine-gun rattle had stilled and the pounding in his chest started to fade. Then: an even louder boom and chunks of concrete exploded outward from the turret’s steel frame. Bucky saw only dust and then nothing but black and the sound of something cracking inside himself.

* * *

 Dark. A sense of immense pressure, holding him _down_ , down _on his back_ , over his face, darkness. Crushed. Like. Tin. He tasted. On his tongue. A sharp stabbing pain in his side and fireworks all colors going off in the back of his brain where he felt something soft and spongy and no that was dirt it was warm and dust and his arms, he struggled with them, shifting. Felt grinding terrible agony as things inside him compressed. Felt like bursting, wheezing, and got his hands up, and _pressed up_ , pushed up, so much more than the weight of anything he’d ever lifted, like he was ripping apart the hull of his own ribs.

The weight lifted. Light shone in. With it: Steve. Of course of course thank God of course.

“You,” Bucky said. “All right. I’m all right, what happened?”

Steve ripped off his mask and dropped down to his knees; Bucky tried squinting at him but couldn’t see much. Flashing lights behind Bucky’s eyeballs. Flashbulbs going off. His ears weren’t working. Steve covered in dust he was covered in dust too. Something cracked in Bucky and Steve reaching for his shoulder with a look half-cracked too, crazed. Bucky said, “ _Don’t touch me._ ” Said, “What happened?”

“--Ship out in the Channel fired right after you--you saved--” words fading in and out, a hand hovering near him but not touching. Bucky concentrated on his breathing. The air stunk like death. Stunk like life. Tasted sweet.

He said, “Gimme a second, shit.” Sat up. Hurting. Tight around his lungs like he’d swallowed spikes and fire in the bones of one leg; he tightened the muscles around it, holding himself together.

Steve said, “Bucky.”

Bucky said, “Anyone dead?”

Steve said, “I don’t know. I came up here.” He paused, and his hand dropped to his own thigh, while he knelt on the ground. “I tried to draw the fire away from the wounded. They were shooting at _me_ \--at--” He turned to glance at the A between the eyes of the Captain America mask, then back at Bucky. Too intent.

“‘Cameraman… too much to hope for?” Bucky said. Watched as Morita clambered painfully up over the lip of the cliff beyond Steve’s shoulder, boosted by Monty, whose beret appeared a second later.

“He’s fine.”

“Least you knocked him over.”

“I told him to walk it off,” Steve said, a dangerous set to his jaw. “Flat feet and all.”

“Ha,” Bucky said. Steve quoting Bucky’s own old coach made him laugh. How do you get stronger? Mr. Higgins had lectured them at practice. You break down, that’s how, then build back up. He kept himself from wincing. He sat upright. Ribs, that was it, something wrong with his ribs, and maybe his femur; it felt wrong, like the burn of cracked green wood, a slippery grit in there that reminded him of the root of a rotten tooth. But couldn’t let on, it would go away on its own.

“You’ve got blood,” Steve said, staring at him, reaching out. Bucky felt for the corner of his mouth. His lip was wet. He wiped it off, tasting tin again.

“Bit my tongue. I’m okay,” he said, loud enough that Steve turned around to see the others approach. “Lemme. Walk it off.”

And he fucking did. He wouldn’t let Morita look at him, which was helped by how even now that they were square Jim still stood at arm’s length sometimes, not wanting to touch him. Bucky walked on a knitting broken leg and ribs that must’ve pierced his lungs, all through the terrifying hot summer landscape where men hung from trees turned into gibbets by parachutes turned into garottes. He’d done it before. Miles tramped out with something broken inside: that was nothing new.

* * *

 They made it to their expected spot near another company and had to round up some spooked Ukrainians who’d wandered away from the German army to defect. Handed them over. Continued on, to the point Peggy had marked for them on one of those thin silk maps. Found a place to rest for the night and Steve insisted on digging a foxhole for the both of them in the wet dirt. He scooped some out with the upturned bowl of his shield. Afterwards, he carefully painted over the front of the shield. Two layers, and on top the same sticky, oily brown Cosmoline Bucky now sat fruitlessly trying to scrub off his gun. The stuff didn’t come off easy.

* * *

 In their foxhole they lay sweating inside the rough itchy gas-proofed fabric they wore, which they hadn’t had any use for yet. But at least Steve had put his on over the stripped-down remains of his Captain America outfit. Just the body armor now, not the red-and-white stripes.

Bucky lay there pressed up against Steve in a way that for awhile didn’t make him think of anything but Lord, he wished he didn’t let off so much heat and please don’t let him hear. Hear what? The little maybe-imagined creak of bones fusing closed. His lungs. Inside. Filling up like whole, unpierced balloons. No place like fuckin’ home, he thought, air aching in his chest. His heartbeat too slow and too strong both at once.

There were crickets outside or cicadas or something. They sounded loud. He was starting to hate the damn noise. And gunfire. The ruckus all mixed together.

Steve had his hand on Bucky’s chest again. It wasn’t comfortable, dug in like this. Dirty and their knees all clumsy and Bucky’s leg burning the way it was twisted around Steve’s but at the same time the heat of him, even though it burned and kept him awake and wary and even though this big body still didn’t feel like Steve, it felt like something, all right. Something strange enough to be safe.

They stayed tautly silent for a long time and Bucky knew Steve was trying to let him sleep. It wasn’t working. At some point Bucky gave up and opened his eyes, studying Steve’s face in the dark, and saw his eyes open too, flicking over Bucky’s face the way they did: hungry. Steve turned his head, still silent, and pressed his lips to Bucky’s. Soft at first, like a test. They hadn’t done this since back in April. Christ, the first damn time in so long they’d touched each other like this because it was stupid, hopeless, they knew that.

Bucky’s teeth ached. His whole skull ached at the pressure of how hard he pushed back. Their lips sticky because they hadn’t wanted to move enough even to take a drink from their canteens. They just tasted each other’s breath. Bucky swallowed with Steve’s tongue in his mouth and it was almost like, almost like nothing happening at all except for the deep burn that started buzzing down his spine. The sour taste of Steve’s spit mixed with the bitter taste of pain. He felt Steve hard against his leg but they couldn’t-- _oh, wait_ because now Steve was shifting around. Muscles bunched against Bucky like metal, hard, and tight, and his hand came up again holding the U.S. Army-issued condom Bucky had tossed him in the boat. “Smart,” Bucky said, very very quiet. He wasn’t gonna let this stop. Well why the hell not, he thought. Too late for them to lock us up. War bonds.

Bucky breathed stifled laughter down Steve’s throat and moved his mouth down, over his jaw, tasting him, their hands meanwhile sliding down too.

U.S. Army condoms, because you can’t get Howard Stark’s invention _wet_. Bucky kissed Steve again, teeth jamming once like the safety on a gun and then mouths sliding sideways into place and hot, warm, sweet like rot and so close this might’ve all been the humid inside of Bucky’s own head. Steve tried to undo his the buttons of his shirt Bucky stopped him, said, softly, “No,” and Steve said nothing but looked at him and Bucky had to bring his own hand up and hold Steve by the jaw very hard, thumb deep in the soft space between his jaw and ear, and then grabbed his hand and dragged it down, said, “No.” So Steve just undid his pants button, the one supposed to work as a compass.

Bucky said, “I--,” started, then just hissed, because when his hips jerked forward it pulled at the locked muscles of his thigh around the broken femur--which he’d been walking on all day with the ends grinding into each other, not letting himself limp. Steve fumbled with the stupid condom, trying to slide it on him while Bucky focusing on breathing through pain and keeping himself from getting soft, thinking of--fucking what--how he had to reassure Steve, how he wanted to _fuck Steve_ how he wished he could bend him over and show him--show him--what, hell--show him need, show him heedlessness, show him the selfishness buried in pain, get him wet and raw and ripped open

and now he was going, jerking in Steve’s hold, his palm rough even through rubber, and then _still_ his other hand on Bucky’s chest. Like he always did. Pressing right down on where it still hurt, like needles in there, _fuck_. The hand on his chest sending deep sharp pangs into him. Steve’s other hand on his cock pulling the want out of him.

Bucky gritted his teeth, screwed his eyes shut tight and let his body shudder and jerk at Steve’s touch, moving his own hand down now, just teasing, touching, rubbing them both in between the twine of their legs and then holding hard the way Steve liked it because _he liked that it hurt_.... Bucky wished he didn’t like that it hurt and wished he didn’t like it when Steve hurt and wished so much that Steve hurting wasn’t the only way he could touch him.

He knew Steve would be thinking about the other Captain America, the one who said that soldier was a part of something bigger. They were, Bucky guessed, and that was what it felt like all right. It had felt like that at first, invincible in the big machine of the Army. (A bullet in your best guy’s gun.) Then somehow he had got cut off; but he had Steve. Who had him. Bucky wasn’t sure who was reassuring who. It had flipped somewhere from him needing Steve to tell him he’d got him to Steve needing Bucky to tell him he mattered. They were pieces of junk machinery that had warped just enough to fit together. Steve looking at that mask with its empty eyes looking back from the sand.

In the morning when he stumbled off into the woods to piss he opened up his shirt and looked down. His whole chest had turned black with bruise, a darker spot right at the middle, underneath where he had taped his dog tags to his chest so they wouldn’t clink.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -President Roosevelt'a speech exhorting people to buy war bonds just a few days after D-Day [may be found here](http://millercenter.org/president/fdroosevelt/speeches/speech-3335).


	12. Chapter 12

They had just finished intersecting a Hydra dropoff in the South of France near Le Muy when they got the news that the Allies had liberated Paris.

All of them clustered around the radio to listen to the triumphant declaration. They received orders, too: the Commandos would proceed there themselves within the week. Dernier cried. He sat winded on the ground, legs out straight in front of him, his jaw dropped straight down under the droop of his mustache. He shook his head. “Je n’osais guère imaginer,” he said. _I hardly dared imagine._

“Guerre,” said Jones, with a different emphasis. _War_.

“La _fin_ de la guerre,” Dernier said. He wiped a hand over his eyes and appeared to drag his face back up with it. He sighed, and the corners of his mouth turned up for the first time in as long as Bucky could recall.

“Your farm,” suggested Morita, rising from his crouch by the radio and starting to pack it away. He still had a lousy accent in French even though he spent all those hours listening and understood perfectly. Bucky and Dum Dum were in the same boat, there. Steve’s accent was fine and he even wrote well in French, and could send off coded radio messages. The serum had helped his memory. Bucky figured that wasn’t always a blessing these days. Lately he’d seen some of the things Steve had been drawing, using stubs of charcoal and spit.

“ _Au diable,_ the farm,” Dernier said, shaking his head at Morita, taking Jones’s hand up from the dirt he sat in. “And the garden too. It is a better world right now.” Bucky wondered about that. Wondered if he’d have that perspective seeing America ripped up the way the Nazis had ripped up France. “We’re going to _Paris_.”

* * *

 Despite the drawings, Steve was doing better since the beach. It wasn’t that things were any easier, it was that he kept himself busy, burning out the brand of his anger in fights. The physical release of frustration in battle made him more tender with Bucky when they were alone. Bucky wasn’t sure what he thought about that. Maybe Steve just kissed him to keep him quiet, but probably not. Actually that was the strange part, how fine Steve seemed now, just as long as he was useful. Just as long as what he was up to didn’t amount to collecting _scrap metal_.

The cruelty they sometimes saw the Allies dole out to prisoners bothered Steve, though. And that was a time when Captain America came in handy. Cap stepping forward to stop summary executions in the field worked a hell of a lot better than Steve Rogers standing up to bullies back home. Which was a good thing. Bucky wasn’t sure he had it in him to finish these fights.

They were winning, and they all felt that. It made it easier. Bucky reflected that it always was easier, being on the winning side. That was how he had run best in track. With a good long lead out in front and the spikes of the nearest behind him snapping at his heels, spurring him on.

He had better than perfect vision and the best possible night sight on his rifle scope. Once, in the dark, he went to shoot the shape of a German sniper he saw in a tree a long ways down the road. His bullet hit home but when they moved forward at Steve’s cautious order, they found the soldier had already been dead. Like a lot of them he had tied himself to the tree and refused to leave his post, died of thirst or another wound Bucky wasn’t sure, but it had been at least a few days. They smelled the familiar stink as soon as the wind changed.

You just couldn’t hold your breath long enough to walk past it all. He tried, though. One Mississippi. Two.

* * *

 They marched into Paris and women threw flowers at Captain America and his Commandos. Captain America made sure they all got private rooms in a tiny hotel. Bucky made a show of flirting with some of the girls, busted out the very worst lines Dernier had fed them all on the way, rolling French r’s fumbled on a Brooklyn tongue. But if a French countryside hung with corpses had felt--or so Bucky told himself--unreal--well this felt unreal too. He couldn’t get used to the dizzying back and forth between missions and life out in the field and their triumphant returns, to base, to the entertainment provided by the army. Even here they had air-dropped books and comics and soldiers passed around Yank Magazine.

“Don’t need it,” he muttered to Steve, “got my own private USO show.”

“Just keep rubbing that in, don’tcha.”

“You got me there.”

Steve came by his room that night, predictably enough, though he looked somewhat reassured when Bucky opened the door alone. Like he really thought he’d have someone else in there. All Bucky’d done was the main thing he always wanted to do, which was wash in the first running water he’d seen in months. Get _clean_. He’d kept walking back and forth between the cool sheets on the bed and the sink in the corner, putting his head under the tap and letting water run down his neck and the bare skin of his back, which made him shiver. He’d also made a job of working his way through a loaf of sour bread and an entire roast chicken, which now sat mostly dismembered on wax paper on the little corner table. When he’d looked down at himself in the bath, earlier, he’d been sort of shocked to see the stripped-of-fat gristle he’d become, muscle and sinew and veins that stood out so prominently they scared him.

“That private show you asked for,” Steve said, shutting the door behind him. He was smiling, a little, in unwound relief. His eyes went up and down Bucky, who hadn’t put on more than his undershorts after he took a bath.

“You’re getting the show,” Bucky said ruefully. He ran a hand through his hair, looking behind Steve to the door, to make sure the latch was in. Steve went to put something wrapped in paper on the table, a string around it. The shape of a bottle inside.

“Just wait, and I’ll give you the whole song and dance if you want.”

“Cold day in hell when you dance.”

“Settle for a hot night in Paris?”

“Oh Lord. Really?” Bucky said. Shaking his head. “That line’d work better with, huh, did you bring--what is that, booze?”

“Jones gave it to me, I think Dernier bargained it up somewhere. He says it’s good, French stuff, better try it even if I can’t get drunk.”

The reason, Bucky realized suddenly, that he didn’t like it when Steve watched him like that, was that it felt somehow belittling. Like he was a good-looking dame. Which wasn’t what he wanted. And didn’t he look back the same way?

But he _did_ want to belittle Steve. That was _exactly_ what he wanted.

Hands on him, brushing at his waist. He almost elbowed Steve in the stomach at the speed with which he turned around.

“Whoa--” and “Sorry,” and “No, it’s--”

And Bucky said, stepping back, “Why d’you think he gave it to you, though.”

“Maybe figured I’d find someone to share it with. Which is about what I’d planned,” though Steve’s arms had slowly crossed themselves and he had that furrow back between his eyebrows.

“Don’t suppose he figured it’d be _me_.”

“No, I actually don’t. I don’t think they have any idea. I think you’re being--”

“Jim does.”

“He--how?”

“Relax, it’s not your fault. Maybe it is. I dunno, he just figured it out. _Months_ ago, I guess.”

“So, and he didn’t tell anyone, and you and he still seem--”

“Seem,” Bucky said bitterly.

“Shit,” Steve said. “What’d he say.”

“Didn’t say much. Enough. He’s not gonna tell, tell on you after what you did for his kid brother? Nah. I mean we’re mostly square, but if he figured it out, I’m only saying.”

“I’m sorry. Jesus, Bucky, I didn’t know.”

“Well. I knew what I was signing up for.”

“Did you?” Steve said. He had his fingers dug into his own arm now and his neck tight.

“No. Okay. Guess not.”

“You want me--you want me to go?”

“No.” He took an abrupt step forward and put his hand on Steve’s crossed arms, tugging at them. “I want to fuck you.”

“I don’t,” Steve said, resisting. “No. Not like--”

“What? What’re you--”

“What I said. I can’t do it like this anymore. The way you, your face gets. You fuck like you hate yourself.” A pause. “I don’t think you hate me.”

“I don’t. God, of course not.” Hated himself. Hated Captain America, maybe, but not Steve.

“I know it’s not easy. I just don’t know what it means to you. I’m not… look, Bucky. The first time I went off and gave a guy a suckjob he threw money at me after, okay? A couple--a couple dollars. And I’d thought it was, you know--I’d thought it was something real, so. I was an idiot. But there are real things, you can--”

“So, what’d you do. No, lemme guess. You threw it back in his face and took a swing at him, for good measure.”

“No.” Gritting his teeth for a second. “He got in the first punch.”

Because of something Steve had said, Bucky bet. Or because, and here he had to stop for a minute and shut his eyes, because the little punk had _thought it was something real._ He could be so blinded by his own belief. “ _Steve_.”

“Let me finish. This isn’t--my friends you said that stuff about. Long hair and rouge. That’s not exactly a joke, you know, not to them.”

“Sure is funny, though.”

“Shut up.”

“Make me.”

“No.” It looked like it took Steve considerable effort to say it. His face had gotten thinner, too, like it did when he got sick; made him look older, more stern and more fragile both.

“Please.” Bucky cupped a hand over his own mouth, at that. Didn’t know why he’d said it.

“What?”

“Please.” His legs buckling under him so he went down on his knees in front of Steve. Like he was a goddamn knight swearing fealty, a badly mixed up kind of game, swearing fealty to Steve still wearing his red Captain America boots. A vaudeville nance. And nothing like that at all. It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t funny. He didn’t look up, he just stared down at the floor, at the toes of Steve’s boots, and then looked slowly up at him, tried putting one hand on his knee, tried sliding it up higher.

“What’re you _doing_ ,” Steve said. He still sounded annoyed.

“I don’t know. I guess I don’t know _anything_.”

“About sucking a guy off, you definitely don’t,” Steve said, gently stepping back from his hand, then, with a creak of boards, coming down to the floor next to him. Bucky choked on an indrawn breath and then couldn’t do anything but laugh.

“You said--” he said finally, “--you said it wasn’t a joke, you shit.” The kind of laughter that hurt his throat, made his eyes sting. Steve was leaning forward with one arm slung over his own updrawn knee and they were still there, in this tiny hotel with creaky floors in Paris, where a German commander had almost blown it all up and then for some reason hadn’t. “I’m not that bad. Am I? Gimme a shot here, I’m still kinda new, I still kind of don’t… but Steve,” he said, finally, serious, _said_ it, “I wanted to. Even before.”

“Well, why didn’t you.”

“Why didn’t _you_ ,” Bucky said, then added, “I was scared, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Steve said, “Me too.”

“You never were.”

“You kidding? Anyway, you always seemed real clear on…”

“Seemed,” Bucky said again. “I’m a bullshitter, is what. Don’t even know why you trust a thing I say.”

“The important things,” Steve said. “Anyhow. It’s not what you say. It’s what you do.”

“Apparently I’m _bad_ at what I _do_ ,” Bucky said, and Steve put his head down and there was that faint smile, wry around the edges, hair hanging in his eyes, and something inside Bucky tightened very hard and then relaxed so suddenly he had to swallow, and then reached out and put his hand on the nape of Steve’s neck. Very gently, thumb stroking the ends of his hair.

Steve said, “You always gotta,” and Bucky said, “I’m not the one who’s always gotta win,” and leaned forward in tiny, halting increments. To kiss Steve, lips soft. No more fight, no more pressure, just slow like a long deep shared sigh. He pulled back and started to say something and then Steve pulled him forward again, which, he wouldn’t have been able to say anything anyhow after looking down at the shiny inside of Steve’s lip. Finally: “Not so bad at that, huh.”

“Geez, Buck, let it go…”

“No, I wanna… hey. You’re the one who brought it up. Don’t say it.”

“Wasn’t gonna.” A long pause again. Bucky started to play with the buckles of Steve’s uniform, undoing them, and Steve shifted to take off his boots. If they’d been out in the field Bucky would’ve commented on the state of his socks but he didn’t.

He felt slow, hesitant. Without the anger behind his touch, with fear only a faint shiver in the background like water down his neck. So, they got Steve peeled mostly out of his uniform and leaning forward toward him on the floor, Bucky propped back on his arms. Steve ran a finger over his stomach, stopped to touch one nipple, and Bucky’s elbows gave out so he fell over backwards on the floor. “Ow.”

“No?” Steve had one hand braced next to his head now, leaning over him.

“No, _yes_ , just… you asked what I want, I dunno what I want.” That was the thing: he had built up such an armature around what he actually wanted he couldn’t recall ever finding it. Touched at it, maybe. Some of those times with Steve when he’d found pleasure in going hard, hurting him, but that couldn’t be what he wanted could it no that was what Steve wanted maybe--maybe--thought back to all the times he’d had with girls. Softness, breasts and the curve of hips dense and plush against his fingers and so easy to handle, like a dance, muffled, and he’d been real good at knowing what they wanted, could read it in a sigh.

“Well,” Steve said now, and his face changed a little. Almost like when he had to give Bucky orders in battle, that look in his eye like he was seeing far. “You trust me?”

“Rogers…”

“You trust me?” Insistent.

“Yeah. I do.”

“Okay.” Steve planted one knee and then he had Bucky around the ribs, and picked him _up_ like he didn’t weigh anything at all and then Bucky was on his back on the bed, all his body tense, one arm going up. Steve over him, really looking at him, one hand sliding down the tight muscle at the side of his stomach then down to take him in his hand. Bucky’s hips moved up to meet him, he couldn’t help it, and something blinding pressed on the inside of his skull behind his eyes. Steve had his mouth on his neck, the side of his neck and Bucky clenched his teeth. The tendons there must’ve moved because Steve stopped immediately, drew back.

“You okay?”

“No--” and he felt Steve’s hand on his cock loosen suddenly and he said, “No but keep going, there. Yeah.” Sucking in air with a whistle, Steve’s teeth and tongue on his neck like the shock of ice in summer that rolled right down through his spine and made him jerk his whole body up suddenly like he was trying to pull free of something and then he relaxed, feet digging into the lumpy mattress, hips moving slowly. Put one hand on Steve’s cheek and then grabbed at his hair, pulling his head up, said, “G’wan, yeah.”

“Yeah,” coming out breathless and Steve's face was flushed and Bucky loved looking at him so he did for a little. Not because he was below him looking up but just because he liked looking. It occurred to him for the first time to say it. “You look real good,” he said, lamely.

Steve’s breath came out harder, faster this time, and he lowered his mouth to suck hard at the skin just under Bucky’s ribcage over his diaphragm where it sort of hurt, where there vibrated their pulse and the slow grinding movement of Bucky's hips. He moved lower and Bucky’s stomach felt like it plummeted with him, tightened.

“Promise I won’t throw any money atcha,” Bucky said.

“Well,” Steve said, after a moment, and when he looked up he was somewhere between a smile and the mindless expression he got during sex when he was just overcome with the physical rush of his new body, Bucky recognized that now. Not so new now, at that. “Dunno, maybe you could pick up a few tips.”

“Punk, that doesn’t even make--”

“Shhhh,” sliding off his shorts, which Bucky kicked free; they flew across the room somewhere, he’d have to find them later and then he forgot about that. “Stay there.”

“What,” Bucky squawked, as Steve backed away off the bed, going over to find his own discarded uniform, bent to rummage in it. Nice to watch him though. But not at all fair. “Thought you were gonna--”

“I am, just wait, you know you’re real impatient sometimes.”

He wasn’t impatient, he was sort of scared. Scared to be just lying there, waiting, not able to hide out in anything, just wanting. His hand went down to hold himself, his own hand familiar at least. He remembered, hell, he had done that before, thinking of a body like this and he remembered now what’d he been thinking of. Maybe not always Steve but his art books. Those for sure. That had been for a long time, the feeling he’d got looking at _art_... that wasn’t about art, at all. He remembered one summer when he’d brought Steve out to Montauk. Throwing watermelon seeds at him just so he could watch him pick them off his skin.

“While you’re up, bring the booze,” he said, looking at the line of Steve’s back, the muscles in there like a picture. Like Charles Atlas but even more graceful, the plane of his shoulders and the way he still had to swing himself around all careful, not used to the breadth of them.

“You sure,” Steve said, just standing there, and Bucky said, "No, not sure, I just," remembering what happened the last time he got really drunk, the stuff he'd said. “Okay, forget it.” His eyes went down to Steve's cock, and he swallowed. Steve was holding a jar of Vaseline and Bucky honestly didn’t know what he thought about this plan. “You know something, I didn’t like it that much.”

“Well, yeah, you wouldn’t let me go get this stuff, you don’t--but you don’t gotta, I wasn’t going to. You asked that time. And I don’t always want it to hurt myself,” he said and stopped because Bucky had frowned, “but no, it’s all right, it was fine I mean it was fine, I like it like that sometimes but _you--_ ”

“No, it felt sorta good, but why,” Bucky said, and then Steve was there, sitting back down next to him, then leaning over him, then on him, their legs together and Bucky’s cock rubbed against Steve’s thigh, and he made a small impatient noise. Skin on skin, smooth and prickly and stinging and smooth again and steely with muscle. Both of them stripped down to muscle and bone, and desire aching like a cramp through it all, painfully poised to flex. “Why’s that though,” he said, but sorta distracted. “Not natural. Dunno why.”

“No _reason_ ,” Steve said, “What’s natural, I’m a science experiment now.”

“You’re not,” Bucky said, surprised how harsh it came out. Steve shook his head, and Bucky said, “You’re you,” and Steve drew back to look at him. “ _You’re you_ ,” Steve said.

Bucky heard blank static in his head for a second and then he just said, “Yeah.” What did Steve know? And then he thought: what did it matter. What did it matter why. A shiver ran through him, a release.

“All right, then,” Steve said. “So. You trust me.” He slid down, and for once Bucky missed the pressure of his big body on top of him. Bucky said, “Yeah.”

“Just my fingers,” Steve said, “You liked that,” looking up at him waiting for his answer, and Bucky said, “Okay,” and, “yes,” and _then_ , in a few moments, “how the hell you even,” tight, bursting, his hips taut and lifting and Steve’s mouth warm and determined and Bucky felt himself bumping into the back of his throat and looked down but he just had his eyes shut and looked _blissful_. Bucky blinked down at him, vision going all blurry while his hips moved up and his fist clenched tight. He said, “Yeah, keep on, you--so _good_ ,” and then something inarticulate and they didn’t have U.S. Army condoms but it didn’t matter because Steve held him in his mouth and swallowed, circling his tongue neatly around the tip of Bucky’s cock.

“You gonna kiss me with that mouth,” Bucky said, and Steve swiped at it with one hand, sitting up, still flushed with arousal himself just splotches on his cheeks uneven in a way he liked. His lips parted to say something, uncertain, but then Bucky said, “‘Cause I want you to,” so Steve just surged forward over him and they did. He tasted himself salt and earthy and sweet and Steve’s breath a little sour. But clean with health in a way it hadn’t been before the serum. Why’d he know what his breath smelled like before the serum. Of course he did, though.

“Now,” he said, “ _Now,_ lemme try this,” so, and Steve nodded. He felt sweaty, all-over tired from his own release but he went at it avidly, pulling, sucking, aware that he hadn’t been so bad really but mostly had been ashamed and that was why he hadn’t, but now he did everything he could think of, bringing up one hand, too, and Steve said, “‘M gonna,” and Bucky just tightened his lips and let his throat convulse and it was all right, the taste. A pulse of heat in his mouth that reminded him. That he wanted. To be alive.

“Okay, Rogers,” he said, coughing a little, crawling up beside Steve. Sticky, hot, but he didn’t care anymore to go over and feel the shiver of water running down his spine. Just wanted to stay here, in the heat under Steve’s armpit. “How ‘bout that.”

“I’d throw a few francs your way,” Steve said, turning, pressing his face into Bucky’s hair. His breath tickled his scalp. “Got some sewn in my sleeve still… no. No, that was, yeah. Better, I _guess_.”

“Good enough,” Bucky said, almost a question.

“Bucky… more than good _enough,_ ” serious now, shifting, sliding over, down, tipping his chin up so they were looking at each other, the sides of their faces pressed hot against the scratchy flattened pillow and sweaty sticky sheets.

“Long as it’s good enough,” Bucky said, a reassurance to them both. Watching the little movements of Steve’s eyelids and lashes. He leaned forward to kiss him, a bare, a guère, touch of their lips. “For now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -[Paris almost getting blown up and then not.](http://www.historynet.com/dietrich-von-choltitz-saved-of-paris-from-destruction-during-world-war-ii.htm) Because Choltitz couldn't destroy such great art and culture.  
> -What happened to the Commandos near Le Muy? See [Chapter Two of my Morita fic set in this 'verse](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4223013/chapters/9819639).  
> -The watermelon seeds scene appears in another of [this fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4332921).


	13. Chapter 13

_One of them is Hydra_ , Bucky thought, staring out over the encampment of soldiers below. _That’s real fucking helpful_. It wasn’t like the guy would throw out that stupid two-handed salute, or wear a skulled squid-- _octopus_ , as Dugan insisted--next to his stripes. They knew it was the ranking officer, that was about it; they had pictures of the man taken from afar. But in the field, soldiers didn’t salute their officers. That made his job harder.

Dugan was his spotter today, surprisingly good at lying low, keeping still, and helping him calculate trajectories. He and Morita traded off doing the job for Bucky, though since May, more Dugan than Morita. Now Jim waited on the other end of the radio, waiting to hear from them once they took out their mark. When they did, they’d beat a loud retreat, pulling as many of the platoon as possible out through the field of mines Dernier had buried in a configuration Bucky had committed to memory. Left, left, twenty yards on right.

Meanwhile, Morita had set up both a signal jammer so the Nazis couldn’t radio for backup, and sound effects to make the them think they faced an American platoon approaching from the south, forcing the Nazis away from their tanks, which Steve, Monty, Dernier, and Jones would come in and hijack as fast as they could.

Bucky had told Steve point-blank he thought the plan was dangerous. He said so, hating himself, feeling like a coward, because it was largely dangerous for him and Dugan this time, as well as Steve, who wouldn’t be inside a tank.

“When I said I might like to go out dancing,” Bucky’d said, “I didn’t mean through a minefield.”

“You know how I feel,” Steve had said, “But I gotta treat you just like anyone else, and it’s the best way. You can make it. You trust me?”

“Yeah. But you fuckin’ owe me.”

“Hold me to it.” Grimly.

Bucky and Dugan set up a solid eight hundred yards from the target, perhaps a bit more. Eight hundred and eighty yards: the distance he had run in two minutes and four seconds back home. The two laps that had once made up the whole of his striving now did so again. Dugan expressed dubiousness at his planned positioning while they paced out the yardage.

“Not getting overconfident, are you?” he said.

“I have perfect confidence,” Bucky said in the just-a-little-too-pert voice he’d always used to charm schoolteachers as a kid and mildly annoy everyone else since then, “in my level of confidence.”

“You’re givin’ me a headache.”

“You just miss your hat.” Bucky’s glibness barely blunted his raw nerves. They’d settle once he was in position. They always did.

“Eh.” Dugan rubbed a hand over the balding spot on his crown. “Maybe you’re all swagger.”

“That any way to talk to your Sergeant?”

“Maybe you’re all swagger and asking for a boot up your ass, _Sergeant_.”

“Maybe so,” Bucky said, looking away. “But ten bucks says I make this one clean.”

“Know better than to take that bet. You don’t _have_ ten bucks.”

“Neither do you. I got one. That’s all I need.”

Dugan groaned.

Dugan was not, of course, wearing his familiar bowler hat. Steve had painted in both their faces to match the brush, which had begun to turn from green to a pale chalky brown. Both of them decked out in burlap brushed with mud and stuck in with grass, so they blended right into the bracken that sat thickly on the hill.

Whatever Steve said, Bucky could be patient. He had gotten used to lying still like this, his finger quiet beside the trigger. Waiting in a state of simultaneous calm and heightened readiness. He _liked_ it. It required something of the same stamina, or madness, as that demanded of a long-distance runner. To stay intent while your body tried to drag you back. To let your mind float above you and ride you tight at the same time. To attain a state of tranquility that nonetheless had force to it, on which thoughts floated like boats on the unbroken surface of the ocean, which could at any moment rise up in heavy swell. It wasn’t hard for him to lie like this for hours. Letting himself gather focus from deep beneath or within himself. Letting all extra thoughts empty, washing back out with the tide.

He waited through the early hours of dawn like that, while sun broke very white over the horizon, heating the dew off the grass and burning some of the moisture out of the air. It raised tiny beads of sweat on his face, which he blinked away to clear his vision.

Eight hundred yards away from the target.

“Past eight hundred yards,” Bucky had told Dugan, after they had paced them off and measured the wind, took a barometer reading of the air, “Is when you can’t hear the bullet coming anymore. _That’s_ why.”

Now Dugan sat just behind him, measuring the speed of the wind one last time. Bucky knew that despite Dum Dum’s uncanny knack for dozing off in dire situations he wouldn’t have, not now. Silently, he passed the notes he’d made up to Bucky, who glanced at them. Really, it came down to feeling, in the end, after he’d scribbled calculations and figured the groundwork. Just a feel for the gun and the target. A feel he had now deep down in his bones.

Eight hundred yards.

The whole of your life laid out in concentric circles and white lines, in barometric pressure and windage. The slight humidity that could mean the difference of a degree in bullet drop; the slight resistance to your breath that could shave a second off your time. The grayed-out stumble down the final straightaway, and the soundless pause of your heart as you came to a stop at the end. The crack of the starting gun and the crack of the gun that finished it.

The silent gun you never heard over the sound of your own heart. Noise faded out entirely at eight hundred yards, when your vision narrowed to the straight bleak finish line or the sight, through the scope, of your target’s chest.

The sky lit up clear above them, no clouds scudding to show him shifts in the breeze. Luckily the Nazis had tied little flags to the tents. They were meant to be a distraction for snipers and they fluttered in the breath of air coming from the northwest, which bore with it the slight chill of oncoming October. The little scraps of fabric looked oddly, quaintly festive. They gave an air of carnival to the camp.

Bucky kept his mouth slightly open, tasting the wind, and watched through his scope. The flags actually helped him, he thought, scornful, helped tell him how he had to adjust his aim with the wind. His focus didn’t falter. He watched a soldier stroll outside with his hat in his hand swinging at his side. Not the target, he could tell. Not someone in charge.

Steve--Captain America--Bucky reflected, was a sniper’s dream. He’d often thought so. That damned shield. That ‘A’ like a target between his eyes.

Something told him to keep his scope on the soldier swinging his hat, pacing outside the tent. Sure enough. A close-cropped head poked out. _Yes_. A pinker patch near the hairline: the scar he’d seen in the blurred photo. _Yes_. _Come on. Come on_. Bucky thought, ready to take the shot that would start him off running this time, too.

There.

He aimed just above and slightly to the left of where he wanted the bullet to go. He took a breath that lifted the swell of his lungs. Felt the beat of his heart, fixed his sight on the breast pocket of his target’s uniform, and shot.

No sound. Just a faraway crumpling. Neat as folded cloth, like an empty uniform dropped on the ground.

“Go, go,” he said, scrambling up, stripping off the camouflage layer and nodding at Dugan to move out ahead. They ran a careful, weaving three hundred yards before Bucky lifted his pistol and fired it off. He heard the faint faraway shouts of Germans giving chase. Dugan ran over to where Steve had left his motorcycle--given how he felt about the thing, a gesture of profound faith--and got on. “Go,” Bucky said, and he took off. With him he took the stereophone they’d set up on the bike, playing the loud false sounds of gunfire and shouting, drawing the attention of the Nazis the other way. Bucky sprinted out into a stand of spruce, planted his foot in the crook of one, and climbed. He had to make sure the mines went off.

If they didn’t, he was fucked.

A jeep made it out into the field and when it rumbled over one of the spots, Bucky flinched at the spraying boom. He saw blood and heard all of a sudden, over both real and recorded sounds of artillery, a keening yipping wail like the high whine of a dog. He saw movement near the remains of the jeep and a lump of mangled green cloth there and red and he gritted his teeth against the sound. The dying soldier thrashed, less than five hundred yards away. Bucky shot. The screaming stopped.

And he heard a long low whistle replace it as a shell came down in the stand of trees where he sat. He launched himself out so hard he broke the branch he sat on, slammed down into the ground, rolled, cradling his gun to his chest to protect it. Jesus that was stupid, why’d he have to shoot like that why’d he give away his position no he couldn’t have who could see him hadda be an accident and he put it aside and went back into his blank combat trance. Darted behind the stand of trees and around, running the perimeter.

Fear never hit him ‘til after. When he came around back to the camp, it was chaos, Steve in the middle throwing his shield, a big dark spot in the uniform just on his back, but he was moving fine thank God it was someone else’s blood. Bucky heard the low thrum of the flung shield and ducked; it hit someone behind him. “Good one,” he shouted, and then they had to pull back, because one of the Commandos in his tank had opened fire. Bucky watched the peculiar juddering dance done by men hit with many rounds at once, the ripping-through of flesh, the spray of blood. The taste and smell of blood and opened bowels now familiar to him. So deep inside him, the smell, that in battle he couldn’t tell where they ended and he began, and it didn’t matter. Sometimes in the mayhem it seemed like they all fought on the same side, some kind of desperate struggle as inevitable as gravity.

Afterwards, they made a pile of all the bodies. It felt like that took longer than the fight. They covered them up with the splattered remains of the Nazis’ tents. They collected the code books, radio equipment, and weaponry; Steve went through the Hydra agent’s pockets. They would report all that stuff back to Carter, who’d report to Phillips.

Morita came limping into camp at the end, toward noon, a little banged up by a near miss fired toward the noises he’d been sending off from his stereophone: sooty but mostly unharmed. Bucky was unprepared for the welling of concern he felt.

* * *

 The engagement a success, they made their way to their rendezvous point, an inn in a little town on the Hungarian border. They didn’t speak the language except Jones, who’d actually pieced together quite a bit, and Steve picked up on a few words real quick. Peggy and the unit of WAFC pilots she accompanied met them up there, and thanked them for keeping the German eyes off the sky. Steve’s eyes still followed her, Bucky noted. Her and Jones. She’d brought, also, letters for them from the nearest base, God knew how she got her hands on that stuff or how long she carried it. Real good of her either way.

The war wasn’t easy on her either. Bucky nodded at her, noting the tiny lines drawn around her mouth, the dishevelment of her hair. “Thanks,” he said.

“You know, Barnes,” she said, “I think we got off on the wrong foot.”

“Ma’am. Agent Carter. I’m afraid where you’re concerned I’ve got two wrong feet,” Bucky said, holding the folded letters she’d given him tight in one hand. “Both of ‘em left. And I’m real sorry about that.”

“Just like Steve,” she said lightly. “Two left feet. But you’re doing well in the field, and I thank you for that. You know we are fighting for the same thing.”

“Thank you,” Bucky said, and once again, “I’m sorry.”

“There’s no need to be. I read your file,” Peggy said. “After Kreischberg, there was some talk of sending you away from the front. You didn’t press it.”

“No,” Bucky said. “There was no need.”

He saw Steve over Peggy’s left shoulder; he sat with the rest of the Commandos, but had glanced their way. He had something in his hand and an odd, inquiring expression on his face. Shit, had they talked this over, planned out Peggy making her peace with him?

“Let me stand both of you gentlemen a drink,” Peggy said, and Bucky said, “Let Steve, he still has all his francs.”

“We’re in Hungary, Barnes.”

“We’re always hungry, all this marching.”

“Oh, no,” Steve said, coming over; obviously he’d heard. “You giving lip to Agent Carter too now?”

Bucky started, and Peggy laughed, and Steve’s face slowly turned red. He sat down at their little table next to Bucky, who put a hand up. Shook him by the shoulder. Quickly let go.

“But you know, though, how it is,” Bucky said, “Nothing to do but think of bad puns all day. Little bits of things get caught in your head. Just me?”

“Not just you,” Peggy said, “That I do understand.”

Over at the table by the bar, Monty was leaning in to one of the WACs, talking animatedly, and so was Dernier. So was Morita, which surprised Bucky, because he thought he’d had a girl at home in a pretty serious fashion. He watched while Morita and the girl playfully started an armwrestling contest, elbows skidding near their beer steins, while Dernier pounded on the table and shouted unintelligible encouragement. Jim let the girl win. Bucky leaned back and caught his eye, and got a shrug in return, a half-smile, before he brought his attention back to the woman who’d now come around next to him, touching his arm.

Monty got up on the table and started to declaim something loudly. Oh Jesus, he always did that when he got drunk.

“Not though the soldier knew  
Someone had blundered.  
Theirs not to make reply,  
Theirs not to reason why--”

“Shut the hell up!” Bucky yelled. “Or do Shakespeare!”

“Anything but Othello,” added Jones.

“If music be the food of love--”

“Shut the hell up, that ain’t music,” said Dugan, yanking him down, “And you’re sloshed.”’

“Shloshed,” Monty said, “You damned Bostonian. I love you all, yanks and froggies and. Trust you with my _life_. I tell you. Cheers.”

“Oh, boy,” Steve said.

“Whaddya got there,” Bucky said, poking him in the side, after Peggy had gotten up and left them sitting with their half-empty pints. “Remember you owe me, what’s that.”

“This,” Steve said, pulling out a little ceramic crock with a wide wooden cork. “ _Honey_.”

“Great, we can put it on the crap bread they got here, it’s got grit or something.”

Bucky didn’t want to stay too much just with Steve so he let him join in on the card game the WACs and Dum Dum had started at one table. Peggy tilted one brow in that direction and then followed herself, and at that, Bucky gave up; he couldn’t trust his bluff with her at the table. So he stepped outside to have a smoke.

Outside in the starlit smoky dark he leaned against the side of the inn, wood rough on his back. He sucked in smoke and blew it out at the moon, then turned when he heard the door creak open again. Bucky thought it was Steve at first and went to berate him, but it was Morita. He stopped and just nodded. He fumbled to adjust his hold on his cigarette, pulling in a breath so he didn’t have to talk. Morita nodded back and lit up too.

“You got a letter,” Bucky said finally. He unfolded his own, read it with some hope of hearing the news on Becca’s kid, but it was from July. They had seen him and Steve in the newsreel. They were real proud. A little worried.

“My girl,” Morita said. “She doesn’t want to get married.”

“Oh,” Bucky said.

“Says it’s not the time to make plans.” He paused. “I kept making plans this whole time.”

“I can’t imagine,” Bucky said.

“I guess you couldn’t, could you?” He took a deep breath. “She’s a nurse. We could’ve run into her anytime out here. I don’t even know where she is. I guess I could’ve asked--but I’ve asked for too much.”

“That,” Bucky said. “Yeah. Tell me about that.”

“You got what you want,” Morita said.

“Not even close, pal. I just don’t make plans.”

“I heard of places in San Antonio,” Morita said suddenly. “You wear a dress back home?”

“No, do _you_?”

“Just never met one of you before.”

“Sure about that?”

“If you’re making a move on me, I’ll sock you in the jaw.”

“Easy, cowboy. I’m not. Just, New York was full of ‘em. Every corner,” Bucky said, embellishing somewhat. “Some of ‘em for you know, trade. What’d you do out in Fresno, farm animals?”

“Plenty.”

“You’re awful close-mouthed about it.”

“Mika’s not the kind you talk about that way.”

“I get it.”

“Eh.” Morita shook his head, dubious, and Bucky knew this was as far as he’d get with him because he was far as he’d gotten with himself. “How’s your sister? You got a little niece or nephew yet?”

“Naw, not yet. Should be any day. You know, maybe there’s hope,” Bucky told him. “Your girl.”

“Guess anything’s possible.” Morita lowered his head, gave a hoarse throat-clearing cough, and flicked his cigarette butt to the ground. He stubbed it out with his heel. “Good night, Barnes.”

“‘Night, Jim.”


	14. Chapter 14

They got the attic room. Bucky liked having a view high up but didn’t like not being near an exit; they’d dealt with ambushes before. They were even more at risk now that Hydra knew Captain America was still after them. Hungary didn’t feel safe. The Axis presence near them loomed large, though they knew the Red Army had just broken through the opposite border. Peggy said the innkeeper was trustworthy and the people in this town supported the Allies, but Bucky couldn’t quash some cynicism. He’d heard stories of towns changing the flags they hung depending on which army approached. Besides, he always felt spooked after a sniping mission, once the calm of its completion wore away. He remained on heightened alert.

When the Nazis caught up with snipers, forget about capture--they’d just execute them right away. He supposed that in some sense that was only fair play.

At least there was a window in the room. Before he went to sleep he unscrewed the rusty, rasping crank latch on it and pushed it open a crack. Air came in. He breathed. He felt so tired, and the drink had started to hit him, slowing his reflexes, jumbling his anxiety into a numb approximation of tranquility. He didn’t even bother getting undressed before he fell into bed. Steve settled in beside him later and murmured something, but he’d already begun fading out into sleep. He felt safer, though, with another body between him and the wide-open floor of the room. Later, half-asleep, he burrowed under Steve like he was a blanket, and then dozed off again.

He woke up entirely against his will, sun crashing in on him and Steve shaking his shoulder. For a weird, dizzying second--with cool fall air blowing and the smell of cooking grease down below--he felt like they hadn’t left Brooklyn.

“Rogers. No. Cut it out. It’s Sunday. Go to church or something.”

“I did.”

Bucky rubbed his eyes. “You serious?” He stared at Steve, who wore a wry little smile and his dress uniform, only slightly creased by their long march. “You’re nuts. You’re _nuts._ Did you go to _Confession_?”

“Yeah, but the priest only spoke Hungarian,” Steve said, with stiff brightness. “So he didn’t understand a word.”

“Oh, _well_ then.” Bucky sat up.

“Anyhow, we’ve got most of the day to kick around,” Steve said. “I brought food. Figured you’d be hungry.”

“Where’s the rest of ‘em,” Bucky said, and buried a yawn in the crook of his elbow.

“Speaking as the captain of this elite squad,” Steve said, “I have not the slightest idea. But I think they threw Monty in the lake this morning. Hadda talk them out of doing the same to you.”

“Gee, thanks.”

Steve had scrounged up some pretty good stuff. Some strong tea almost as good as coffee. A couple boiled eggs, cheese, bread studded with fruit that clearly hadn’t come from the kitchen downstairs. Good stuff. Bucky upended the honey jar over a thick slice of bread and shook, watching the clear golden viscous strings trail out. He hadn’t tasted sweet that wasn’t ration chocolate bars or M&Ms in a long while. He took huge bites, letting the sugar burn away the heaviness of fatigue from his brain. His fingers quickly got sticky. “You want any?” He asked Steve, who had gone to sit cross legged on the other end of the bed, watching him.

“Nah.”

“You’re staring.”

“Not the food I’m staring at, honey,” Steve said, but his ears were turning pink.

“Steve.”

“You don’t let me--” He made a frustrated grasping gesture, like he was trying to pluck unspoken words out of the air.

“Steve, did you… did you think that one up walking back from _Church_? Did you--you worked really hard on that, I bet. You’re _proud_ of yourself.”

“You’re an ass.”

“If you’re good and lemme finish I’ll let you put your cock in my ass.”

“That’s--that’s not real romantic.”

“Ro _man_ tic?” Bucky shook his head. “Is that what you’re after?”

“You said all that stuff to girls back home.”

“Yeah, and it’s bullshit.” Bucky shrugged, dipping the last of his bread directly into the jar of honey, pulled it out, and drizzled it over his tongue. He swallowed. “You got me this just so you could try that line. What’d you barter for it?”

“Five…. seven chocolate bars,” Steve said, grudgingly.

“Steve,” Bucky said, calmly licking his fingers clean, one by one, and starting on the stickiness at his wrist, “Those’re your rations. You need the calories. Stark said. What’m I gonna do, hunt chickens for you? But it was sweet,” he said. “Real romantic. Kinda dumb.”

“I owed you.”

“Okay.” Bucky brushed his hands off on his pants, which he realized he was still wearing from last night. He didn’t like it. “Tell you what. Can the icky baby talk--”

“If icky girl keep on talking that way, big stwong man's gonna kick all of her teef _wiiiight_ down her fwoat,” Steve vamped in a falsetto singsong, quoting Groucho Marx from _Horse Feathers_. “Yeah, yeah.”

“--can it for a second, lemme go to the toilet and brush my teeth and shave, and I’ll come back and I’ll talk sweet to you a little if you want. But I dunno if that’s what you want. Maybe you want some teeth knocked down your throat.”

“Not from _Groucho_.” But Steve shifted, uncomfortable. Ah, Bucky thought. Right. Somehow he _did_ have an inkling of what Steve liked, still found it easier to think of that than of himself. But luckily they matched up, sometimes.

“You stay there.” Bucky turned to him, quick, and cupped his hands around his jaw, lowered his lips to Steve’s ear. “You stay here. Take off your clothes. And when I get back I’m gonna fuck you down on your stomach and hold your head back by the hair and put my tongue on you wherever you want and you’re not gonna be able to see straight. Then you can throw me in the lake, for all I care, I’ll be happy. How’s that for sweet talk, honey.” A game, it struck him, they had come out the other side of this thing and now it was a game again. Just baseball. Bright green and clear, pure blue.

“Better,” Steve said. “Still not exactly,” he shut his eyes for a second and took an indrawn breath, “what I had in mind.”

“You’re turning red,” Bucky observed. “See, you do that. You tell me I gotta talk romantic and then I go and make you blush. You’re pretty when you blush.”

“Quit _kidding_.” Steve ducked his head away.

“No,” Bucky said, leaning over to trail the tips of his fingers across the side of Steve’s face, then straightening up, “I’m not.”

* * *

 Afterwards. They both sat leaning against the musty wallpapered wall, shoulder to shoulder, looking at the motes floating in the waning light that came in through the window. Clouds had blown in, so the air had taken on a cold pallor.

Steve had a little circle of honey in the crease of his thigh, just the shape of Bucky’s mouth, sticking the hair there in a swirl. Bucky reached down and cupped Steve’s cock in his hand, felt the soft satiny texture. The stroke of his thumb was rewarded with barely a twitch. Huh. He’d done pretty good for once.

“A fella could get used to this kind of treatment,” Bucky said, letting go. He slid his knees up and leaned sideways against Steve, brought his fingertips to his mouth to clean the last of the tackiness on them away with his tongue.

“I owed you,” Steve said. “I _owe_ you.”

“Enough with that. Almost as bad as throwing money at me.”

Steve winced. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant…”

Bucky gave him a quelling look. “You know what I keep thinking?”

“Tell me.”

“Keep thinking how I _am_ getting used to it. Like any other job. We march around, we fight Nazis, we go out drinking, we… sometimes I stop thinking about when the war’s gonna end. I guess you can get used to anything,” he reflected.

“Yeah,” Steve said. He reached out one of his arms straight in front of him and rotated it at the shoulder, examining the indent of his own tricep and the tough muscles that corded his forearm. “Sometimes feels like I’ve always been like this.”

“You were, isn’t that the point?” Bucky said. Good things better. Bad things worse.

“Bucky,” Steve said, turning to him so their faces were very close, “It is gonna end. It’s gonna end. You gotta trust me. ” For a strange remote moment he looked at Steve and he did see the mask. That was him, really. Captain America who stepped in to save captive soldiers from execution. Captain America who stood by while Bucky listened to a man say, “Ich gebe auf.” Steve Rogers, whose conviction--whose faith--had always drifted a little free of reason. And hell if Bucky didn’t trust him anyhow. _No reason_. _No reason,_ he thought. _There doesn’t need to be. God. Don’t think about it._

“It’s gonna end,” Bucky said. His voice broke in his throat. “Don’t tell me that. Don’t tell me.” He shoved at Steve, trying to push him away. Steve shoved back. They grappled, wrestled, Bucky’s chest tight and pounding and then Steve got him down on his back, covering him with his body, grabbing at his fingers, holding his hands down by his head.

“Don’t tell me,” Bucky said.

Steve said, “It’s gonna be fine.”

“Don’t--” He was breathing so fast he couldn’t see. “Don’t--” “You’re.” “Please, I’m scared.” “I’ve got you.” “Don’t.” “I love you.” “Don’t. No. Stop.”

There were spots in front of his eyes and he bowed his back, trying--trying probably harder than Steve even knew--he was used to his new strength already, he didn’t even know--trying to throw him off, and he couldn’t, so he let himself go limp under Steve. He shut his eyes. Let them open. Gave up.

“Bucky?”

“Yeah?” he said, swallowing, his chest moving up and down under the weight on him. His stomach hurt; it felt a little like he was going to throw up. When had it become comforting, to lie on his back held down? When had he become grateful for the metal table, the strange buried things he didn’t quite remember, that sometimes woke him up at night?

When he’d looked down at his chest and seen the black bruise had faded. When he’d realized everything now hurt a little less. When Steve had saved him and they’d plunged into this strange shared dream and he’d realized he didn’t want to wake up.

 _Click your heels together three times_ he thought. _No, don’t._ Red boots. Peggy’s red dress. The compass Steve still carried in his pocket.

When he realized that he’d started worrying about such everyday things: like how Steve could tell him he loved him, but still let his eyes follow Peggy. How Bucky caught himself thinking, what if I wanna get married? What if Steve does? What if it’s not real? The vicious beating thing in his chest.

“Bucky?” Steve’s voice sounded truly concerned now, and Bucky snapped back, blinking up at him. He felt cold sweat on his face. Steve let go one of his hands to wipe it off, his touch gentle. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” He shifted. Bucky felt the flutter of Steve’s stomach against his, skin tickling skin, and the solid pressure of his chest and legs. “Am I hurting you?”

“No. Yes. Don’t move, stay there.”

“Okay. I meant it, though.”

“Yeah, I’m just… Steve, I’m not that brave. I’m not…” He struggled to put it into words, even for himself. His terror that, back in the real world of black and white, all this would fade away. Assuming they made it out, even assuming that. He thought of how the worst part for him wasn’t the battle, it was what came _after_ , the endless nothing. The moment when your victory lap was done and you stood exhausted by the empty track, just a pointless circle now. Your race run. Your glory gone. Nothing left but white lines scuffed with rust-red dust.

He thought about Mr. Higgins, the flask in his desk, the stories he’d heard about what happened to him after they’d left school. The way he’d talked about the Great War like he almost wanted to go back.

Bucky remembered wanting _desperately_ to go home. _Hoping_ they’d get caught and thrown out of the army and somehow even the disgrace would be all right, even a blue ticket, they’d make that work all right. Fucking stupid. He couldn’t think of a future, that was all, couldn’t think of anything past the finish line for them. The end of the line. The World’s Fair railroad on the very last day they had finished tearing it down, right before he’d got the draft. Once it had reached all the way out to Jamaica Yard. And now it just wasn’t there anymore.

“I just,” Bucky said, “I just started thinking of what ifs. It’s stupid, I guess. Been keeping my head down and… and then you say a thing like that. I don’t know. I told you.”

“I don’t know anything either. I make it all up,” Steve admitted, shifting a little to one side, pressure sliding over Bucky’s guts. “I don’t think anyone knows--”

“But you go for it any--” Bucky burped. “Shit,” he said. “Steve, get up. I think I’m gonna hurl.”

Steve rolled off him and Bucky pushed himself upright when he was free, holding a fist just under his ribs, swallowing, leaning over, listening to a buzzing sound build and then fade in his head. Steve put a hand on his back. They’d sat like this--no, just the opposite--at home, when Steve had used to double up coughing. Now his touch felt tentative, like he didn’t want to press too hard anymore.

“Not used to all that sugar,” Bucky said at last, breathing through his nose, waiting for his stomach to settle. “‘Kay. All clear.”

“Bucky, I--”

They heard a hesitant tapping on the door. Steve leapt up like he’d been shot off a spring, grabbing for underwear and pants, which he had left in a wrinkled heap. He was a terrible fucking soldier. Bucky himself just lay back in bed, dragging the sheet over him. He’d say he was feeling sick. It was the truth.

“Cap?” Monty’s plummy accent vibrated through the wood. “We’ve some news on how we’re to proceed, when you and Sergeant Barnes are ready.”

“Yes--” Steve finished doing up his shirt, didn’t bother with his jacket, and pulled the door open, still smoothing his hair to one side. He settled his shoulders and put on his Captain America face. From side view, Bucky noted, the shift was almost seamless. “--Right.”

“Hey,” Bucky croaked.

Monty’s hair was still damp and slicked back. He looked doleful. “Looking rough, there, Barnes.”

“You’re one to talk. I hear the water’s fine.”

Monty gave a shiver. “Bracing, if anything. Come on, then.”

“Yeah, lemme get dressed. Don’t make any plans without me,” Bucky said.

“Downstairs in ten minutes?” Steve said, giving him a helpless look. Bucky nodded back, firm.

“Yep.”

When they were gone he got up and picked up Steve’s jacket, first thing, shaking out the wrinkles and going to hang it on the bed rail. He felt a hard lump in one pocket and reached in, groping for it. When he drew it out, he saw it was of course Steve’s compass. He couldn’t help himself; he flicked it open. Peggy’s face stared out, looking just past him.

When he pulled the compass closer, staring himself, the needle spun and spun.


	15. Chapter 15

The fear that had built before the mission had already begun to ebb. It melted like the snowflakes that landed on his cheeks, numbing his skin to a tight, frozen mask. Still. He stared down into the gulf in front of them, the thin cable stretching to nowhere.

“Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone at Coney Island?” Bucky said, to cut the tension.

“Yeah, and I threw up?”

“This isn’t payback, is it?”

“Now, why would I do that?” A wry smile played on Steve's lips.

In the two months since Steve had said what he’d said, Bucky hadn’t given him any better reply than the day in Hungary when he’d sat doubled over and close to retching himself.

Bucky opened his mouth to say, _yeah, you don’t owe me nothin’--_ but Jones, listening to the radio Morita had tuned to Hydra’s frequency, cut in.

“You were right. Dr. Zola’s on the train.”

The clanking of the train on its tracks sounded familiar. He recalled the time when they’d laid down track up in Queens and he’d made his way along the top of it, arms out like a tightrope walker, legs tensed as he stalked the newly built steel: track he had bolted into place himself. He had laughed and leapt down nimbly afterwards, showing off, and taken a bow with one arm outswept.

Now he landed in a careful crouch and looked back to be sure the rest had made it, too, then followed Steve down the ladder to the inside of the train. The screech of metal on metal faded to a background rattle. The train’s interior shook and flickered like a faulty celluloid reel. Steve turned in a doorway to look back at Bucky and Bucky thought, _he still doesn’t keep his damn guard up._ Steve took a step forward, and the door between them slid shut.

Blue light blazed--those energy beams Howard Stark so fucking admired--and Bucky threw himself behind a stack of crates. Blasts sizzled past him, trailing smoke. He leaned out to fire back, feeling for the target, but between smoke and the rattle of the train he couldn’t get the same clear shot he had gotten used to. Not with his pistol. Too close in range. He fired again--they’d know his position now, so he darted across to the other side, slammed his back into the wall, pulled back the bolt on his gun. Breathed. No more bullets. Tried to breathe. Tasted sour scared spit on his tongue.

The door slid open and there, thank God of course--Steve, tossing him another pistol, then slamming himself forward in the reckless way of his, sliding a large heavy chest onto their attacker. Bucky straightened up when he was sure the coast was clear.

“I had him on the ropes.”

“I know you did.”

And then--a blast, a screeching tear of metal, _Steve knocked to one side, his stupid shield sliding away_ , and Bucky picked it up, held it like a target over his own chest. Willing himself not to look yet to see if Steve was all right, clenching his teeth against the impulse. He shot at the armored soldier. Shot again. The train jerked and jolted, and blast blew by him, to tear a hole in the metal siding of the train car. And the wind whipped and ripped him out with it--

Thrown, he grabbed tight to the only thing he could reach, the metal handle of a door, and hung over the abyss, legs swinging.

 _There was Steve_. Barely audible through the blinding wind as he edged out toward Bucky, a pitch of desperation in his voice.

“Bucky. Hang on. Grab my hand. Now.”

The big machine shuddered. The piece he clung to flung itself free.

* * *

On his way down Bucky found himself thinking in just a flash-- _I give up_ \--and his hands released their now-useless hold on the broken door. They had started to slip even before it had ripped away. Before the choice had been made for him.

He wondered if his fingers would have let go their grasp if he’d had just one more minute. He wondered if he’d _meant_ to let go, out of some awful, evil spite.

The near-relief of freefall.

He heard himself scream before he was aware that he’d opened his mouth to make a sound.The noise echoed behind him while he fell, the opposite motion to when he came gasping up out of the vortex of his dreams, with words he did not recall having spoken on his tongue. He fell, now, back into it, and crashed through the bottom.

Pain opened him like a lover. Like the only real lover he’d ever had.

It spread him raw. It reached from his guts up to claw at his throat.

His fingers, no. His arms. His--

He saw a seeping pool of red and blinked dazzled gray spots that would not go away. That marched across his vision in determined swarm. There came a drain from inside of him like falling even still but down inside himself, into the void of his own veins.

The very flow of blood was fear.

But luckily. Blood emptied. Away. In stuttering pulses. And long slow pools. Like music. Like the kind of music you could dance to; a dance that slid into you so quiet and so slow. Blood moved you. Like a trance. A dance. The flow. _When I said I might like to go dancing,_ he thought, _when I said, I didn’t mean. Mama; Becca. I just wanna go home--_

White and gray around him. He didn’t feel fear. Anymore. He could see. No colors. He could see. For the first time.

The color of blood. _To someone_. Who couldn’t see red.

He said, to the swirling black and white, the hurricane that had carried him out of himself, and into himself, and away:

“Steve, you were right, I’m fine.”

His voice came from far away and would not stop. Words jumbled. Steve all right I’m fine fine all right? All right? Does it hurt? Does it hurt? It doesn’t hurt; now I know. It’s gonna end, and that’s all right.

When is it gonna end?

Long slow pools. One Mississippi.

Two Mississippi.

Three.

Cold beyond cold.

It was--it was--he _was_ cold. He didn’t _feel_ cold. It was in. His skin. _Under my skin_.

Deep. Deep. Down. Inside. Himself. The empty rattle. Of tin.

It didn’t end.

It started to hurt again. Blackness came, but he woke up. To see little white snowflakes falling from the sky. He tried to reach up and catch one but his arm wasn’t there. The thick white flakes fell faster. His blood had pooled to a frozen sludge, dark honey against his skin. And a little white--melting-- Hadda--Hadda remember why it was so--so important--the little white--

The relentless and very, very slow beat of his heart.

And now.

It hurt. So much.

 _Take my hand. Now_. Dark shapes over him. Had he reached out? They had him by the arm. They pulled. The sticky seal his blood had made over his wound ripped away and the world left him.

* * *

 He woke up in a black box. Grit on the cold concrete floor pressed against his body and he had a strange warmth in his veins, a warmth like the hot green-gray rot of New York garbage. There was a liquorish sweetness to the smell. Fire raced up the left side of his body and back down.

It was just him. Naked. Alone. No one there.

He lay there staring at the ceiling and didn’t even bother to count.

Had it ever ended?

The metal table.

The numbers that clacked by, all by themselves, without his choice. Little gears. In a giant ticking clock.

And the stumbling freefall as he raced the minute hand to the end. To meet the final number that would toll victory or defeat.

The door clanged open and they threw in a bowl. He didn’t eat. He stared up at the dark ceiling. It was slightly vaulted. Underground. Shadows made patterns there. The slanting shadows that grew and overlapped. If he didn’t count the time, he could tell Steve, see? I knew you’d come. Right now. I wasn’t even scared. If he didn’t count the time, it didn’t count.

The clock ticking down the time of his final lap.

The next time his eyes opened even his eyeballs felt dry. He woke up to an awful fetid stink, his mouth so parched he couldn’t for a moment move his tongue. His bowels contracted but there was nothing there so he let the cramp shake him emptily inside out. A spasm, a seizure, yes, this happened when wracked with thirst. Thirst. It pressed him over onto his left side and Oh. God. Oh. Ragged flesh. Hard to see colors in the dark but mottled green and purple and streaks of putrescence and he COULD NOT STOP he thrashed and the thing that had been his arm squished sickly on the gritty floor and he panted like a dog dry-tongued and _sunk his own teeth into the soft flesh by his shoulder and gnawed and ripped off the dead part of him and_ \--

* * *

 The next time his eyes opened the ragged flesh was gone, along with what remained of his arm up to the ball of his shoulder. It had been wrapped in a bright white piece of gauze.

“Soon your New York will be rubble under the sea,” a voice said from outside the cell. It echoed, crackling, from the place between the ceiling and one wall “Please let me know if you can speak. It would be helpful to learn what your Captain may know of this plan.”

“Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes. 32557038.” Bucky dragged himself painfully upright on the lever of his bent right elbow. His arm shook, so weak, as he pushed himself up against the wall. Spots danced in front of his eyes. He listened, intent, eyes darting around dark corners. Where was the voice coming from? He couldn’t see. One of his legs shook against the floor, a tremor he couldn’t prevent. “Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes. 32557038.”

“Ah. Very helpful.” The voice echoed. He could not place the accent.

“Captain _America_?” Bucky said, scornful. “He doesn’t know anything. I don’t know. Jesus God. What are you gonna do?”

“Are you sure about that? You Yankees are such notorious liars. Tom… fucking… Sawyer, 32557038. Was it not?”

“How the fuck do you know--” It wasn’t Zola’s voice. It wasn’t. It couldn’t be. Their mission had to have succeeded, they had to have taken the train, they--

“What does your Captain know of the Valkyrie?”

“Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, 32557038.” Valkyrie. Weren’t they the flying horsewomen who came to take dead soldiers away?

“He knows nothing?”

“Sergeant James Buchanan motherfucking Barnes. 32557038.” Mama, Becca, Lizzie. Everyone back home. Steve, trying to stop it. Maybe he would. Where was Steve? No, no, no. “You piece a’ shit. You think you’re gonna bomb New York? You’re gonna--hey,” Bucky said.

* * *

  _Hey, you heard this one._

_It was a joke someone told on this radio show, said Morita. Back in the Kreischberg camp, Bucky had gotten the shit beat out of him when he’d gone after some of the guards, after George Hamden had keeled over working and they’d clubbed in his skull. Bucky had hissed while Morita poured some of his conserved water ration over the gash across Bucky’s forehead. The water had been brackish and dirty, but that couldn’t be helped. It was cleaner than the crap ground into the wound, anyhow._

_Here’s how it goes, Morita said, his voice and hands careful, steady, and slow._

_So there’s this British paratrooper. He’s shot down over German territory and gets captured._

_This is a lousy joke, said Bucky. I can tell already. You’re as bad as my friend Steve. He tells the sad sack piece a’ crap jokes too. You oughtta hear. Always forgetting the punch lines, too._

_Yeah, said Morita, it is a lousy joke, but listen to how it goes._

_Okay._

_So there’s a British paratrooper gets shot down over Nazi territory. They catch him and put him to work in a factory. He’s clumsy, so he loses a couple of fingers right away. He goes up to the Nazi guard and he goes, when you next bomb Britain, can you drop my fingers too? The Nazi figures, sure, why not._

_The paratrooper’s real clumsy._

_(Morita’s hands still steady, ripping cloth to wind around Bucky’s sprained wrist, bracing it tight.)_

_So he loses a foot next. Same thing. Sends it out to get air-dropped over London. This continues for a couple weeks, Morita went on, his mouth sliding into a wry line at the exasperated look on Bucky’s face. He loses his foot. Another finger. His whole leg. At some point the Nazi guard tells him they can’t keep sending out those pieces of him with the bombers anymore._

_Why not? Bucky said._

_Why not, Morita said, That’s what the paratrooper asked. So, the Nazi goes: Vee haff reason to belief you are tryink to escape._

_Bucky snorted at Morita’s butchered accent and said, Pretty dumb way to escape._

_You’re not trying to get out that way yourself, are you, Sarge?_

* * *

 “Here’s an idea,” Bucky said, now. “When you go to bomb New York, whyn’t you have ‘em take my arm along and drop it right over there, too.”

“That is an unhelpful request.”

“I swear to God I’m not trying to escape. I’ll let Captain America do that for me.”

“You had said that Captain Rogers does not know of this plan?”

“Captain _America_ doesn’t know shit. Neither do I.”

“Do you have anything to add?”

“Guess you haven’t heard the one about the British airman?”

Silence.

“Ve haff reason to believe,” Bucky mocked, “you are tryink--to escape--” and he threw his head back and laughed until he choked.

* * *

 For a long time after that he was plunged back into a narrow tunnel again, of celluloid light and needles and something metal that shook.

He measured the vague sweep of days and weeks by the hollows that grew between his ribs, the stink that ground itself deep into his skin. The tender new flesh that sealed the place his arm had been. One night (was it night?) he dreamed of Steve’s mouth, kissing the puckered scar there. He woke up and when it hit him that he was alone he stopped breathing so long he blacked out again. These days that wasn’t hard. The thin stubborn thread of his breath held him only lightly to the waking world.

He fought when he could. He stopped when he couldn’t. The selfish thing inside him still wanted to stay alive. And still believed he would. Still believed--

_Click your heels together three times. I wanna go home._

Through needles and metal and liquid shot into him. Through the chemicals he tasted in the back of his throat as they bloomed out from his veins. Through all, that, he still--

The metal table. The whole of his life. And that was. Enough to fight for. _I guess you can get used to anything. Sometimes I think I’ve always been--_

He woke up to feel a hard tight grip on his jaw. He snarled.

Light glinted at him from up above. Two round shapes that at first he thought might be the doubled image of the sun.

“Are you familiar with Herr Doktor Freud?” said Dr. Zola. “It appears that you have something of what he calls an oral fixation, Sergeant Barnes. Perhaps this will soothe you. Perhaps you will not bite my technicians then. What a shame.” Bucky’s mouth opened in a desperate pant and he tasted it, on the back of his tongue: tin. _Tried to remember_. “We do not wish to hurt you. Torture is so _inefficient_.”

Something rubber slid between his teeth. A strap came around the back of his head. He tried to fight, to bite down, and he failed.

The blur of morphine: he remembered that from before. The way it haloed all the light.

Time passed. Or did it wind back? The gears in the clock.

When he woke up he had a new left arm. Heavy. A new alloy. _Sehr gut. Sehr stark._ It came up at his will and _grasped_ , and _squeezed_ and _held on_. The sensation he felt through it vibrated back to his brain very faint, like a cramp, and made him crush the thing he held tightly and more tightly still. The stupid thrashing thing he held struggled and flailed and then: stopped.

Shouting. The surge of drugs in his veins. A warm flow of darkness, the color of blood inside his head.

He came back on the table still, held down.

“I had mentioned before,” Zola said, studying a clipboard he held in one hand. “We have found torture to be an ineffective incentive.”

Bucky tensed. Leather straps held him, bound even the metal thing that had been his arm (a tin soldier on a tin table), the tightness of them almost a comfort, holding him away from Zola. As the cables of his muscles tightened, the leather creaked.

“ _Das Leder_ ,” Zola said, “is not so _stark_ \--not so strong. You are aware that with perhaps a sixty-seven percent application of your maximal force would break you free. _Die Bindung… die Verbundenheit._ It is not these bonds that hold you. I am aware that you are waiting. You fear a deception. You are quite correct.”

Three of the masked soldiers behind Zola pushed forward. A small figure stumbled ahead of them: a little girl. Chestnut hair and blank gray eyes. She looked drugged. She looked so, so familiar.

“The resemblance is _unheimlich, ist_ it not? To speak in the terms of Doktor Freud. Or _heimisch_ , I should say, a reminder of home. Your sister. We have looked into your file, of course, Sergeant Barnes, 32557038. A lovely picture of Rebecca Barnes.” He turned away and spoke quietly to the soldier. Two of the soldiers stepped smartly to one side, spreading the girl’s limp arms. She sagged between them.

“You are, truly, not so special,” Zola said, “We have found that most American soldiers do not fight for some big belief like your idealistic Captain. You fight for the man beside you. Your buddy. Your pal. The gal next door back home. Your mother’s apple pie.” The words sounded so strange coming from him. Charlie and His Orchestra; the eerie voices on Morita’s radio. “It intrigued me to note how you responded to the deaths of your comrades in the camp. You became quite violent. We killed one of your friends and you killed one of our guards. An eye for an eye, is that not it? Primitive but intriguing. We have noted that you do not respond directly to your own pain. That is also quite common. At a certain point the body simply gives out. That is that death drive Freud has written about. But I go on. As I was saying, the bonds that hold you here, _Verbundenheit_. You can cooperate or we will hurt not you--we will hurt someone else. It is a choice for you to make. You have killed one of my technicians, Sergeant Barnes, with the arm we gave you, with Hydra’s strong arm. So, now, it is of course to be an eye for an eye, Sergeant Barnes. An arm for an arm.”

 _NO NO NO_. Against his will, the metal of his arm moved, and the leather on one side began to rip free--

The soldiers pulled the girl’s arms taut as a wind-whipped flag. She hung between them. From behind the sharp downward chop of a thick blade. Blood sprayed. The arm came free and she swung around in an arc, tethered on only one side. A scream built behind the guard in Bucky’s mouth and he strained at the leather like a leashed dog. _No no no no no_.

“If you move. She will die. If you comply with our wishes hereon, she will live.”

His arm half-free. He froze

The girl slumped there, in marble-pale drugged calm.

Winged Victory, like the statue Steve had gone to see in the Louvre and later had described to him. With no wings and the stump of an arm. Blood dripping from the hem of her gray ragged dress and down the pallor of her shin. Winged Victory, sagging to her knees in defeat.

“ _Sehr gut_ ,” Zola said again, and the soldiers stepped forward and whipped a cord around the stump of the girl’s arm, a tourniquet: keeping his promise. Saving her life. Another came forward and did the same to Bucky, tightening the strap he had loosened on the left side.

* * *

 Later: “You know I have found myself thinking of late not only of Doktor Freud but also the excellent writings of Herr Marx?”

They had taken off his gag. They had let him drink and eat. Bucky’s throat strained, unused to unstoppered speech. “Groucho or Harpo?” he grated.

“Our Russian comrades believe in good for all of mankind. It is a beautiful sentiment, I think. It is one your Captain shared, when he crashed our great hope into the Arctic. He died so that many could live.”

“Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, 32557038. Sergeant James--”

“But I do go on. Now, then. Please tell me, Sergeant Barnes, if this hurts.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -There you have it. This section of the ‘If’ series is done. I want to give a very, very heartfelt thanks to all the readers who have left such remarkable, thoughtful, insightful, motivating comments. Your words have meant so much to me. I can’t believe so many bright and interesting people have read and enjoyed this story. It’s truly humbling and I’m so glad to be a member of this fandom community. As always, comments mean a lot to me, so I would love it if you took the time to leave one.  
> -German translations: _Leder_ = leather. _Bindung_ = bonds; _Verbundenheit_ refers to things that bind more generally. Zola is making a play on words with _unheimlich_ \--uncanny--vs. _heimisch_ , familiar.  
> -I have written an essay on Freudian symbolism in this fic [here](http://samtalksfunny.tumblr.com/post/126603098993/freud-and-bucky-barnes-in-my-fic). Read if you dare.  
> 

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [nightismyconfidante](http://archiveofourown.org/users/nightismyconfidante/pseuds/nightismyconfidante) for editing my German translations!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Never Doubt I Love](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4537476) by [stripyjamjar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stripyjamjar/pseuds/stripyjamjar)




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